DIY Life

My husband has bins of random old computer parts, and I've begged him repeatedly to get rid of them. He has always said that you can never be sure when you might need one of those parts. I'm sure he's got useless stuff in there, though, like maybe a broken CD drive. Who needs that kind of junk? Well, apparently a broken CD drive isn't necessarily junk after all.

This instructables tutorial teaches us how to make a USB cooling fan for a notebook with a old CD drive. If you've got a bin like ours, you probably already have everything you need for this project.

Now that external CD-ROM drives for personal computers are so insanely cheap, why not find a use for them outside the PC? In the latest edition of maximizing the value from that CD-ROM player, some researchers in Spain have demonstrated the ability to make a standard CD-ROM player into a highly accurate medical imaging scanner.

By adding two light sensors to an existing CD-ROM drive, the research team was able to create a new device that could detect very small amounts of pesticides located within samples that were placed on top of an ordinary compact disc (after having been inserted into the modified CD-ROM player, that is).

Since the interaction of several components are often measured in the medical field using proteins and antibodies, the equipment to accurately track these movements has so far been limited to specialized and expensive equipment that uses light to take measurements. Since a CD-ROM is basically a light emitter (laser) anyway, it seems natural to modify one to look at measuring different items using light wavelengths, yes?

So, if you're an aspiring home biologist with $50 to kill and some patience, how about turning your spare bedroom into a miniature medical lab with a CD-ROM player? Don't forget the BL-4 suit, okay?

Coming into this blog post, number four in my series about building your own computer, I finally have had some of the components delivered. I have included some pictures and information to keep you up to date, but we're not nearly ready to begin assembling parts. I'm hoping that my editors aren't getting too annoyed that I haven't started actually screwing parts together yet. Perhaps I should have told them that I didn't have $900 dollars to plunk down to buy all the parts at one time. Oh well, my intention was to walk you through this slowly any way. You can see my first three lead -in posts via this link!


This week I went through the process of choosing my hard drives. Yes, I mean drive(S), as in more than one. After getting various opinions on the subject I have decided that my new computer shall be set up with two hard drives. One will serve for daily use and the second one will be a fully updated backup kept on hand as an instant replacement just in case the first one fails. It was suggested that I could run the two hard drives in tandem, using one for the operating system and one for image storage which is a fine idea also but I have determined that I do not need that volume of data storage capacity yet and that option would still leave me needing a back up solution. I can always throw another drive in there. That's one of the advantages of building a computer from scratch.

CD/DVD drives sometimes misbehave. If you are laughing, you know that it's true. They also produce one of the common error messages your computer can give you that just doesn't make sense to most of us. What in the world is "buffer overrun error" for example? Geeks will tell you that this means the data didn't quite make it onto the CD because such-and-such, or thus-and-so happened, all you know is that it didn't work, plain and simple.

Fine, so now your drive is stuck in its ticked-off position, and you can't get the blasted disc out of the drive? If you just tried restarting your computer, congratulations, that is the best thing to try if your drive is acting up. If that doesn't fix it, there is an easy fix. It is time to get a little invasive.