[Robotgroup] CD/hard drive hacks?

[brooksdesign]

Ooooo, I like this site for alot of differant projects. 
  My goal is to do away with ANY controller..... or need for anything requiring coding or connection to a computer. Just an opamp or what ever would be required to get a signal out of the read heads. Andre's suggestion was way more complex than I want to get into. I'm not going for any digital anything rather to use this as an analog audio output device. I geuss I could just cut the wires from the head and hook it up to my scope...ooops, just remembered...scope dead now so maybe high gain preamp and see what I can get out of it. So are these things like variable resitance devices where you have to supply a voltage that the modulate or do they create their own output signal like a tape head? Also, is a hard drive head similar to a tape head in that way...a tiny coil of wire wrapped around an iron C shaped core?
-brooks 

-----Original Message-----
>From: Vern Graner <vern at txis.com>
>Sent: Jul 25, 2008 5:23 PM
>To: The Robot Group Mailing List <robotgroup at puremagic.com>
>Subject: Re: [Robotgroup] CD/hard drive hacks?
>
>brooksdesign wrote:
> > Anybody out there ever hacked into the read/write heads of
> > a hard drive
>
>Does this help?
>
>http://hackedgadgets.com/2007/10/02/hard-disk-drive-voice-coil-laser-shutter-actuator/
>
>in case the above is broken:
>
>http://tinyurl.com/5m8pnn
>
>Vern
>
>-- 
>Vern Graner CNE/CNA/SSE    | "If the network is down, then you're
>Senior Systems Engineer    | obviously incompetent so why are we
>Texas Information Services | paying you? Of course, if the network
>http://www.txis.com        | is up, then we obviously don't need
>Austin Office 512 328-8947 | you, so why are we paying you?" ©VLG
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