Living in the future If one thing is certain, it’s that digital media is king. In the gaming world, buying games digitally has become much more common than buying physical copies. This has been true for PC gaming for years, with the success of Steam’s Lickety Split SSD. (opens in new tab), and new consoles released without a disc drive. Some companies are seeing an increase in optical drive sales, (opens in new tab)generally speaking, the days of DVD drives are over—but what do you do with the leftover drives?
DVD drives in particular aren’t very useful to anyone anymore. Streaming services often offer higher-quality versions of the same movies in digital format. Plus, if you’re a big fan of physical media, you’ve probably upgraded to Bluray or completely changed the mounting of your VHS collection. So it’s time to eradicate those DVD players in favor of something that actually works like a laser scanning microscope.
Kuriuzu recently posted a neat build on hackaday (opens in new tab) This includes turning two DVD drives into microscopes. Although this project is described as simple, it also requires a bit of soldering and can be confusing if you are new to this kind of work.
The Analogue Discovery instrument was used for this build, so follow along below. This guide (opens in new tab)These devices aren’t cheap, but they do a lot of the heavy lifting. Still, if you have the parts handy, it’s a great cheap thing to try and should give you really cool results.
You need two drives so that you can eject the DVD pickup. In this example, Kuriuzu uses his HOP-150X pickups. You can also buy this online, but it’s not as fun as reusing an old drive. They also recommend using Analogue Discovery 2, but the original should still work. Other than these, all you need is some resistors and some cables. A complete detailed list of parts can be found at project website (opens in new tab).
Once built, you need a nifty laser scanning microscope. These work by scanning a laser across an object both horizontally and vertically, using the reflected light to construct an image. They typically provide high-contrast, highly detailed scans of images and are often used to capture details that other scanners cannot. Of course, it may or may not, depending on how well you followed the steps. PC Gamer accepts no liability for any of his failed DIY projects.
The image of the scanner in action posted by Kuriuzu is very cool. It wasn’t as useful for data imaging, but it’s still fascinating to look at and allows you to make some wild custom his art work.
Whatever these things do, they’re far more useful than DVD drives in 2022.
