Medix has been working on some interesting projects but as some of you know I have a soft spot for hard disk drive projects. By removing the drive motor and platters there was room to install a shutter in the center. The voice coil that normally moves the read/write head is then used to actuate the shutter open and closed. It can be connected to some external control equipment by using the jack that is mounted on the back side.
We have seen a similar design in the past that uses a simple flag that is attached directly to the read/write arm to break the beam.
Go here to see more pictures of the hack.
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Fantastic! (This sure was a surprise)
Looks like I’ll have to get this page updated as well.. 😉 I believe the original post for this hdd mod was where I got the idea. Never had time to test it but all I needed was a shutter for beam control. The control is also based around the 16F877 which uses an external interrupt to trigger the shutter. Voice coil drive is based around the LMD18200 in conjunction with drop-out relay that cuts in a current-limiting resistor (after a few ms). This gives fast actuation with low holding current.