The Floppotron is an impressive creation built from hacked floppy drives and other old PC hardware to create musical tones and then made to work together to recreate the Star Wars main theme.
Can General Solo get these people a medal?
"How does it work? The principle is simple. Every device with an electric motor is able to generate a sound. Scanners and floppy drives use stepper motors to move the head with sensors which scans the image or performs read/write operations on a magnetic disk. The sound generated by a motor depends on driving speed. The higher the frequency, the greater the pitch. Hard disks use a magnet and a coil to tilt the head. When voltage is supplied for long enough, the head speeds up and hits the bound making the „drum hit” sound. The disk head coil can also be used as a speaker to play tones or even music, but… that would be too easy and too obvious.
Every column of 8 floppy drives is connected to one 8-channel controller built on ATMega16 microcontroller. One controller acts as one voice with envelope simulation – the higher the volume, the more drives are playing. This allows to make ADSR-like shape and simulate a musical instrument, like a piano (exponential decay) or string instrument (sine, vibrato). "
Can General Solo get these people a medal?
"How does it work? The principle is simple. Every device with an electric motor is able to generate a sound. Scanners and floppy drives use stepper motors to move the head with sensors which scans the image or performs read/write operations on a magnetic disk. The sound generated by a motor depends on driving speed. The higher the frequency, the greater the pitch. Hard disks use a magnet and a coil to tilt the head. When voltage is supplied for long enough, the head speeds up and hits the bound making the „drum hit” sound. The disk head coil can also be used as a speaker to play tones or even music, but… that would be too easy and too obvious.
Every column of 8 floppy drives is connected to one 8-channel controller built on ATMega16 microcontroller. One controller acts as one voice with envelope simulation – the higher the volume, the more drives are playing. This allows to make ADSR-like shape and simulate a musical instrument, like a piano (exponential decay) or string instrument (sine, vibrato). "
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Pretty cool! I recall watching some videos like this on YouTube of Star Wars and other songs.
Well... now that's been done!
Fascinating, don't get me wrong, but at some point these things become a bit ludicrous: https://youtu.be/IvUU8joBb1Q.
Hahaha yeah. It's neat to see people do critics things but at the expense of how many hours? I also wonder if these things have any resale value?
"Selling a hand crank wooden music machine that plays one song. 1,000 or best offer. Will accept PS4 trade."