Floppy Drive Orchestra Makes Music With Obsolete Tech

Anyone who has been around the tech world long enough to remember floppy drives probably hasn't used a floppy drive in many years. That doesn't mean you might not have a number of them sitting around on a shelf in the garage or at work where things never seem to be thrown away. One geek who had a bunch of floppy drives lying around decided to put them to use making music.

The project required a myRIO embedded controller that is able to play the floppy drives like musical instruments. To make the music, the controller stepped the drive motors at specific frequencies. The builder started with a quartet and then expanded the project to a 16-piece orchestra.

The myRIO controller runs a LabVIEW VI that is able to convert musical notes into a wave frequency. An example of this conversion is musical note C4 converts to a frequency of 261.63 Hz. Another LabVIEW was used to generate the pulse train needed to control the floppy motors.

MIDI files were used to create the music and those files are played from a flash drive connected to a USB port. Watch the video to see the floppy drive orchestra in action playing some music.

SOURCE: decibel