Hello everyone!

This is my fifth project on Instructables & Thanks everyone liked this.

You have a broken hard drive? You would put it in the trash or sell it on Ebay for a few dollars? Oh no!

Get ready to turn your crashed hard drive into a unique clock. This project only requires a little skill, your ingenuity and a little knowledge of electronics.

This work is based on Ian Smith's version of the same. His work is excellent, and his website on this topic will help provide a complete picture for this instructable.

You can search with keywords "HDD Clock" or "POV clock" to see the unique clock from the hard drive.

In this project I have two versions of HDD Clock: a simple version and another version showing the number.

In the simple version, you can see three hands of the clock looks like mechanical watch. Yes! That is the hour hand and minute hand second hand. But you can not distinguish them by short hand or long hand. You must distinguish them by color. Red for the hour hand, the minute hand green and blue for the second hand.

So how a hard drive can be displayed like that?

The platter of a hard drive spins well over sixty times a second. If a narrow slot was cut into the platter to allow LEDs to shine through, we can achieve flicker fusion and trick the eye into seeing a stable image. This phenomenon is known as persistence of vision (POV). There are many examples of LEDs being used for POV, building an image by moving the LEDs or having the observer move relative to them. The LEDs used in this project do not move, and the image is built using the interference of the slotted, spinning platter.

Version clock can display the number seems more complex. You can easily see the time and it also displays the animation, I will present in another project.