Floppy Jukebox
From TkkrLab
Just like me you probably have listened to the music produced by floppy disks/scanners/and other hardware containing stepper motors. I remember the first time i heard this was on the Amiga a long time ago. I got inspired by this and i thought it would be a good learning experience to create something similar using the Arduino. Some 5,25" and 3,25" drives where gathering dust at our hacking space and in my attic i found an old SCSI case with power supply and room for 4 5,25" devices. I thought it would be nice to create a sort of Jukebox which could play songs. I ended up with a Floppy Jukebox playing midi songs stored on an micro-sd card. A remote from a broken cd-player is used to select and play the songs.
Later i added an RGB led strip for some visuals and for the Gogbot 2011 OSC_Databending project i added an Ethernet port to control the Jukebox with OSC Messages.
Floppy Jukebox with disco lights:
First version:
Hardware specs:
- Arduino Uno used as controller, later replaced by arduino ethernet for OSC_Databending
- 4 Floppy drives as instruments
- SD-card to store the songs
- IR sensor + remote to control playing
- A 4 x 5,25" device bay case with power supply
- RGB Led strip
- Optional: Ethernet shield for OSC
Software specs:
- Arduino 0022 software
- SD-FAT library to access the SD card
- IR library for remote controller
- I converted the midi files to 1 track songs with a python program which i programmed for this task.
- The main code on the arduino reads the songs from the sd-card and uses a ringbuffer and interrupt driven code to play a maximum of 4 notes simultaneously on the 4 drives. At the same time activaty on drive 1 to 3 is also controlling the RGB values of the led strip creating a disco like effect. If no song is playing a slow color cycling routine drives the ledstrip. Trough the later added OSC interface a song can be selected or (when not playing) the lighting color can be set.
