January 08, 2014

Creating music with floppy drives on a large scale

It's no secret that you can make music by controlling the stepper motor inside a floppy drive, and the more drives you have the more realistic or involved your music can become. Taking this concept to heart, enthusiast Martin Fischer has created what could loosely be termed as a floppy drive orchestra - consisting of forty 3.5" FDDs to play various tunes, including Tetris as shown in the video below:

Doing so isn't that difficult at all, each floppy drive only requires three digital ouput pins from an Arduino, and you can make decent sounds with a much smaller quantity of drives. Finally Martin has provided some example sketches and an Arduino library to help even further, so visit his website to learn more. And for more, we're on twitter and Google+, so follow us for news and product updates as well.

When adding external hardware to your next Arduino project, you'll need a protoshield to mount the external circuitry. In doing so, consider our range of ProtoShields. From the tiny LeoStick to the Mega range, we offer a complete range for you to work with.

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