I got my hard drive clock project up and running today after some advice 
from you folks.  I took a drive that worked, but had no room and 
re-mounted the moter higher up to get it functioning and all the led's and 
sensor mounted.

I am using a tiny magnet glued to the platter and a hall-effect to time 
the rotation, and tri-color led's are mounted around the edge for 
lighting.  The platter is going to be replaced with a nicer one now that 
I have working hardware.  It's too thin, off center and just plain bad.

The PIC is a 16F88 running with the internal 8MHz clock.  One digital pin 
for the hall effect switch, and three digital outs hooked to darlington 
drivers for the red, green and blue 12v lights.  Code is pretty simple, 
just a single interupt to time the speed of the platter (since it's a hard 
drive I could hard code the speed but I like it this way because you can 
slow it down with a finger and it maintains the image) and then turning 
the leds on and off when needed.

Here are two images, and a video...

http://www.ian.org/HD-Clock/FirstLight.jpg

http://www.ian.org/HD-Clock/NastyPlatterSlice.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dh2ulD3tmDQ

--
Ian Smith
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