Floppies were once the standard method of information exchange, but decades of storage can render them unreadable, especially if mold sets in. [Rob Smith] wanted to clean some floppies in style and made a Disco Rube Goldberg-Style device for the job.
Starting with a disk caddy on linear rails, [Smith] has a track for the floppy to follow. First it goes through a set of pads with cleaning solution on them, and is then dried off with heating elements. To make it more fun, the device has LEDs and a set of speakers at the bottom to treat the disk to a more complete car wash-esque experience.
Cotton swabs and a cleaning solution are all you really need to do the job by hand, but if you have a lot of floppies, that can get tedious quickly. [Smith] compares his machine’s performance to doing it by hand with both IPA and a dish soap solution showing that his machine does indeed clean the disks and usually makes them more readable than they were before. He cautions that it might be best to make multiple copies of the disk during the cleaning process as it isn’t always constructive though.
Thinking about archiving that stack of floppies under your workbench? While Linux doesn’t support the drives anymore, we’ve covered a couple different methods in the past and the importance of reading the flux.
The name seems off because this is a practical device that directly performs a task. The crux of a Rube Goldberg device isn’t it’s complexity. Wikipedia describes these devices as “a chain reaction–type machine or contraption intentionally designed to perform a simple task in an indirect and (impractically) overly complicated way.”
Its an overly complex device doing a simple task. Its a Rube Goldberg design.
Agreed. I don’t see any superfluous (non value added) steps such as launching the disk across the room into the machine via a trebuchet which was triggered by a mouse chewing through a cheese infused rope.
The mechanical processes in play seem to be focused directly on the task at hand.
Granted, it does look like a carnival midway riding on a circus train with the superfluous flashing bits and garish colors, but that’s just visual fluff that doesn’t really seem to be involved with controlling or influencing the cleaning process.
I really didn’t look closely enough to know, but the flashy lights could be status indicators. So maybe they are just deluxe rather than extraneous. :-)
“Practical” is doing incredibly heavy lifting here. Is anybody going to be cleaning enough floppies to justify the effort put into building the machine?
Maybe if you work public sector actually
Hate to be that guy but, I think speakers and floppy discs were never a good thing to combine.
Those tiny speakers probably don’t generate enough magnetic flux to cause problems.