Once a Polish engineer and programmer Pavel Zadrozhnyak thought that just throwing away outdated computer equipment - floppy drives, scanners, broken hard drives - is too easy. But what to do with them? We must teach them to play music! Every experienced computer scientist is familiar with the sounds of a floppy or hard drive.
And Paul created a musical instrument that he called the Floppotron. The first version was created in 2011 and consisted of just two floppy drives. They were controlled by an ATMega microcontroller. The video, in which "Floppotron" plays the Imperial March from Star Wars, was posted on YouTube and instantly gained popularity.
Floppotron version 1.
There is nothing new or supernatural about this - everything is very simple. The sound comes from a magnetic head driven by a stepper motor. To get a specific sound, the head must move at the appropriate frequency.
Scanners and disk drives use stepper motors to move the head with sensors that scan an image or perform read / write operations on a magnetic disk. The sound generated by the motor depends on the speed of its movement: the higher the frequency, the higher the pitch. Hard drives use a magnet and a coil to tilt the head. When voltage is applied long enough, the head accelerates and hits the limit, making a "drum hit" sound.
Floppotron version 2.
The second version, more perfect, was born in 2016. Pavel added not a lot of floppy drives (there are sixty-four of them in the second version), but also eight hard drives and two ordinary flatbed scanners. Blocks of eight drives work under the control of ATMega16, parts from Arduino Uno acted as a scanner controller, and hard home-made controllers on field-effect transistors.
Promotional video:
The basis for Flopotron's music is MIDI music files. The software of the device converts them into an algorithm of individual commands, according to which all "musical instruments" know when they need to hum, click or be silent.