Not a bad idea, but also nearly everything we interact with, technology-wise, has microcontrollers of some form or another. The AVRs so adored by the arduino community actually exist in large volumes in automobiles, and even crappy USB keyboards and mice which we might throw out have microcontrollers in them.
So I'm all for scavenging compute bits for future projects, but it is by no means unique to HDDs.
The key is tools, and OpenOCD is one of them, which let you "talk" to these systems. I picked up a Black Magic probe [1] and am building cables for it to talk to one of my ARM boards. That kind of stuff makes the spelunking possible.
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Not a bad idea, but also nearly everything we interact with, technology-wise, has microcontrollers of some form or another. The AVRs so adored by the arduino community actually exist in large volumes in automobiles, and even crappy USB keyboards and mice which we might throw out have microcontrollers in them.
So I'm all for scavenging compute bits for future projects, but it is by no means unique to HDDs.
The key is tools, and OpenOCD is one of them, which let you "talk" to these systems. I picked up a Black Magic probe [1] and am building cables for it to talk to one of my ARM boards. That kind of stuff makes the spelunking possible.
[1] http://www.blacksphere.co.nz/main/blackmagic
also the things cost pennies! For example the ATMEGA328 will run you a grand total of $2.88 in a quantity of 1.