14 DAY TRIAL // For a device to catch fire is bad. Very bad. Still, many find it fascinating when something, especially a computer, bursts into flames. Provided no one is hurt of course.
Caleb Kraft didn't have this as justification, or at least not sole justification, for inventing a way to make a laptop self-destructing.
That's right, Caleb from Hack a Day used thermite to cause a laptop to catch fire, ostensibly to melt the HDD and, thus, destroy all the files on it.
This would protect any sensitive data from landing in the wrong hands, making the fire-causing add-on the most thorough and aggressive anti-theft system ever.
Thermite catches fire hard though, so Caleb had to use model rocket igniters, gun powder, and magnesium to make the ignition system.
“What I finally landed on was an ignition system that uses model rocket igniters, gun powder, and magnesium to light the thermite. The model rocket igniter can be set off from the 12v line inside your computer,” he wrote.
“However, it isn’t hot enough to light magnesium shavings, much less thermite. To get it to work, I needed to add some gunpowder. A small amount of gun powder would get hot enough to light the magnesium shavings, which in turn were hot enough to light the thermite. I had to be careful though, because too much gunpowder would cause a rapid expansion, blowing the thermite everywhere instead of lighting it. You can actually see some red thermite being blown out of the external hard drive and the laptop as the gunpowder ignites.”
The effectiveness of the method when it came to destroying the HDD was a bit uncertain at first, but Caleb found that completely replacing the CD-ROM with thermite was enough to ensure that even a quick use of a fire extinguisher would be insufficient to save the HDD.
The drive core was completely gone by the end of the test, and all the platters were destroyed.
