Washing Machine Drives [was: Homebrew Drum Computer (magnetic heads)]

Robert Nansel wrote: If all of this is some proof of concept step anyway, why not use ST412 type 5.25"-form-factor drives? The platters are still large enough that you could do something with them, surely, and they're still reasonably available. Heck - get a multi-platter drive, rip out all but one platter, and figure out a way of mounting all the existing heads in parallel on just the one surface in order to simulate drum tracks. For a backyard engineering project, that can't be any worse than screwing around with VCR heads. Keeping things clean during assembly will be interesting, and you'd presumably need to seal everything afterwards to keep particles out (but use plexiglass so you can see the guts). On the plus side, you get a balanced spindle, data surface, and a bunch of matched heads 'for free'. %deity% knows what issues there'll be with suitable amplification / processing of the read signal, and with writing - but that's no worse that a VCR solution or a homebrew drum running at a few thousand RPM :-) I'm not convinced it can be done due to the fine tolerances involved - but I'd be really interested to see someone try! Maybe for version 0.1 just use a single head on the surface (i.e. use the existing head arm) and figure out how to write data and read it back again... cheers Jules