HD activity Neon

[Overload]

I was walking though wal-mart the other day and went past some neon lights that blink to sound. this gave me a great idea. Make a neon light inside of case blink to HD activity. has anyone seen or tryed anything like this?

[Oni]

That sounds really cool! I think it'd be rather easy as well.

[zoopa_man]

I have neons that blink when my subs on my car stereo hit. They are controlled by a little box that has a sensor on it. you can adjust the gain on the sensor to make it more or less sensitive to the volume of noise it takes to make it blink. Your hard drive isn't all that loud so it might be difficult to set the gain to blink only when the hard drive is going...you might some blinking form other noises...Like fans running...or your MP3's blairing away. But it's worth a try.

[TJ9]

The hard drive has a LED that lights up when it is used. I think you could just cut the LED out and put in a switch that would be activated when the LED that you cut out would have normaly reciecved power. Now have that switch control the neon light. I think that should work.

[Yoric]

I do not know much about electronics but would that be called a voltage regulator

maybe you could use a relay

[Oni]

You could mod it into your HDD indicator led, so it blinked when your HDD led recieved power to light up. 2 things though

1) Those run off of 5 volts, and the average neon tube runs off of 12 volts. You might need a step-up transformer, which could be costly, and might not even be able to step up 5 volts to 12 volts

2) It would be a serious drain on the gas in the neon tube, and create stress on the leads in the tube, causing them to break early. Neon works by exciting various inert gasses with electricity. This gas takes quite a bit of power on the offset to become excited, but afterwards doesn't need so much to remain excited. You would probably end up burning out your tube in pretty short order.

[Yoric]

what I mean is us the indicator LEDs power to regulate a 12v line through the neon with something like a physical relay so when power runs through the LED's circuit the relay will put power through the neon
maybe you could get a sound activated neon. remove the microphone and replace it with wire from the indicator LED
would something like that work?

[Overload]

wireing it to the HD led was what i had it mind. a relay should work, dont know why i didnt think of it.

oni: is there a differance between regular neons and those used in car audio that blink. if so what.

also would EMI be a concern. i have seem plenty of mods with neons. are these special neons (low EMI)? what type of neon would you suggest for this mod?