Sweet Stepper Of [Jeremy]’s Rocks Out With Its Box Out

Inspired by the floppy drive orchestras of others, [Jeremy] has built a Pi-driven MIDI music box with stepper motor resonators and outlined the build on hackaday.io.

Control for the motors comes from an Iteaduino Mega 2560. The music starts as a MIDI file, gets processed into a text file, and is played over serial by a Raspberry Pi. He’s added percussion using K’NEX instruments and 9g servos, which we think is a nice touch. It can be powered via LiPo or from the wall, and [Jeremy] baked in protection against blowing up the battery. As he explains in the tour video after the break, the box is clamped to a wooden table to provide richer sound.

[Jeremy]’s favorite part of the build was enclosing the thing as it was his first time using panel-mount components. Stick around to see a walk-through of the guts and a second video demonstrating its musical prowess.

Inside the music box:

 

Rocking out:

12 thoughts on “Sweet Stepper Of [Jeremy]’s Rocks Out With Its Box Out

    1. The majority of the floppy music builds I’ve seen don’t destroy the drives. They just send appropriately timed pulses to the motor step pin on the ribbon connector to drive the existing stepper controller. Why reinvent the wheel by tearing them apart and essentially re-creating hardware that does the job?

      On an unrelated note, this thing looks like Cookie Monster. Just add a couple googly eyes and there you go.

  1. I absolutely love knex! Not the modern stuff which is 5 custom pieces that easily clip together, but the older stuff which was a bag of generic bits and a large instruction manual. IMHO it was better than LEGO.

    I never had meccanno so perhaps that’s why I love knex, its more mechanical than LEGO with the gears etc (Never had much technics, I guess it was too expensive or not marketed to UK kids).

    I think I still have the knex solar panel running a project :D

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