That’s very cool, I was wondering if a Pi Pico could be used for something like this. My initial thoughts were to use a Pico to run an OLED panel showing HDD activity and Turbo status, a bit overkill, but if it can also do the audio then that would be a nice little add on.

make spinning sounds loud again! 🤣
nice project! not sure about using the spinning sound looping in the background but the head sounds are very nice!

I'm planning to make it very configurable so that anyone using this can easily change the HDD samples it uses or change other aspects. As from the comments on the video so far it's clear that everyone has their own preferences in this arena 😀

I've successfully tested it in my 386 and it was able to detect HDD LED activity to act as a trigger and then relay a signal to the PCs case HDD LED

I'm waiting for some additional parts to arrive from Pimoroni (small speaker, mount, jumper cables) along with a few eBay purchases (Molox to USB power & 3.5mm audio jacks). Once these arrive I'll clean up the prototype so it's more "production" ready.

I've decided to address both the mounting and power problems with a single solution, that being making use of a ISA board as shown in the image below

Thanks to Martin Niec at https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/284508460587 for these superb prototyping ISA PCBs

These provide 5v and ground connections through the ISA bus.

I've also purchased a new CompactFlash to IDE adapter and replaced the HDD LED with a connector so that I can link it to the PCB, rather than take it from the motherboard. This means that a passthrough approach isn't required and the PC can continue to drive the case indicator LEDs as normal. However I've also programmed the Pico to provide a replacement HDD LED output for those who wish to wire up their PC this way.

Once I've wired up the ISA board I'll post a new video of it in operation.

Finally a thanks to Ian Scott of PicoGUS fame https://github.com/polpo/picogus who has kindly shared his knowledge about interfacing with a Pi Pico over the ISA bus. For a future revision of this device it may be possible to detect HDD activity purely from the ISA bus within some systems.

I also like the idea of writing a utility that can talk with the Pico over the ISA bus to allow for configuration to be performed directly on the PC itself. Although that's really for a version 2 of this device, but it's nice to have idea for the future.

Great project--what's the status?