While playing music with floppy drives has been done many times over, making any device with a stepper motor play music still appeals to the hacker in all of us. [Tyler] designed an Arduino shield and a library which lets you get up and running in no time. [Tyler]’s shield includes pin headers to connect 4 floppy drives, which plug directly into the shield. The drives don’t need any modification before being used.
While you could simply wire a few floppy drives up to an Arduino with some jumpers, this breakout shield makes connecting your drives trivial. In addition to designing the shield, [Tyler] released an Arduino library to make things even easier. The library lets you simply set the frequency you want each drive to play, which saves a bit of legwork.
The floppy-controlling Arduino library is available on GitHub and a video of the controller is included after the break.
“First, the floppy cable needs to NOT have a twist in it between the shield and the drive. Basically, floppy cables usually have three connectors: motherboard, floppy B, and floppy A. There’s a twist in the cable for floppy A, but the shield is designed with floppy pin 12 (DRIVE B SELECT) grounded, so you need to NOT have that twist. That usually means using a three-connector cable, and connecting the drive to the middle port.”
Hey, this is Tyler, the guy who made it. I posted an update that fixes this problem by bridging both drive select lines together.
Just when I’ve finally thrown out my old diskdrives..
Good work though, nice to see all the info available too so you can learn and build your own if you like.
I know the feeling, I keep a big pile of stuff around and it never gets used. I throw it out, next day, there is something interesting to do with it.
Well at least now floppies have some use.
Are you going to release the board design?
Sorry, just found the FloppyShield link in the original article.
If anyone wants to check out a port of SammyIAm’s Moppy (Musical Floppy) Arduino code to AVR C, you can look at my Moppy_AVR project here:
http://hackaday.io/project/3013-Moppy_AVR
This is if you do not want to use an arduino, and just want to use a bare AVR MCU.
Nice work, are there any demos of your board with floppies?
Yeah sorry. I did not see the video in the first place :-)
Why 4 floppy drives? Why not 8?
Hi, I’m the guy who made the thing.
The short answer is that I didn’t understand the drive protocol as well when I designed the board. Right now it simply grounds the drive select pin so I can pulse the step and direction pins.
The longer answer is that to control two drives on a single cable, you’d need to control both enable lines plus step and direction, so you’d need 4*4 = 16 pins. While there are enough pins, it would make things more complicated, both in hardware and software.
Certainly doable, though. Folks are welcome to fork my board design to do this.