Lol - the 'overkill' approach was mostly one of expediency, since I had spent most of the summer I had to work on this project just trying to get my hands on th

Lol - the 'overkill' approach was mostly one of expediency, since I had spent most of the summer I had to work on this project just trying to get my hands on the disk drive and then powering it on without blowing a fuse. I only had 2-3 weeks to throw everything together, so the 'robot' was basically the Z-stage of a Makerbot 3D printer with some acrylic widgets to push the read-head, then the signal was fed into an analog comparator chip and then into a shift register in my FPGA board. The craziest part is that it worked, and I was able to recover the data!