Moppy Lets You Play Your Floppy Drives

Get ready to join a band. Just follow the guide over at the Moppy project page and you’ll have your very own floppy drive instrument.

The name is a mashup between Musical and Floppy. By using an Arduino UNO as a translator, you can command an array of floppy drives with a musical keyboard (think piano). The head on each floppy drive is controlled by a stepper motor which will put out some sweet sounds if driven at just the right frequency. The lower notes tend to fair a bit better than the high range. One great example of this is the Imperial March theme as heard after the break.

Once you get the base system up and running, it’s time to think of some alternate interfaces. Sure, you can obvious things like toy keyboards. But wouldn’t it be more fun to make it fruit controlled?

13 thoughts on “Moppy Lets You Play Your Floppy Drives

  1. Yeah moppy is nice and i am using it for some time.
    it works great with up to 16 drives (i only use 12 on youtube) and i think it is very good idea to use it with keyboards.
    i hope there will be a tutorial to use other sources too (i am bad at Java) ;)

  2. it seems that more and more arduino is being used in musical applications, often paired with older pieces of technology such as these floppy drives. as a musician who dabbles in hacking i find that to be very exciting.

  3. I am still looking for an Arduino standalone floppy
    Imperial march that actually gives the code and a schematic .

    There seems to be a lot on the web that are Arduino based but no one seems to want to share all the info.

    1. true, I have a hard time even getting my floppy to move because everyone seems to be using (mostly) different pins etc. Then again, my drive could be fried.

  4. You got to be kidding me, they actually featured something I sent in, although I highly doubt it was from my mail (otherwise they’d be 2 months too late)

    Ontopic:
    For the people who are interested, Moppy can be scaled up to 16 drives (full MIDI band) with some adjustments you can find at: https://github.com/ggppjj/Moppy

Leave a Reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.