How to Make Musical Floppy Drives

My brother posted a video about this on facebook almost a year ago. Some old floppy drives playing Bach's masterpiece Toccata & Fugue and it got me really interested. So I read about it when the author posted a how-to on his blog and did a couple of tweaking using SammyIAm's Musical Floppy program when the project gained a lot of attention.

WHAT YOU NEED

1) Arduino - Ideally, you need the Arduino UNO but any Arduino would work. You just need to tweak something in the program with the pin assignments. In this mini-project however, I used Duemilanove. It works almost accurately as Arduino UNO and I didn't have to tweak anything.

2) Floppy Drives/Disks - Any floppy drive would work but it's a lot easier to use the 34-pin simply because it's common. Other than that, you would only be needing to determine 3 pins from your floppy. Pin assignments are available online, particularly here. Furthermore, I was trying to acquire a 5.25 floppy drive but to no avail, and ebay sells them around $20 so I said never mind about that. As a result, this project is composed only of the 3.25 floppy disk drives. You also need some floppy diskettes for this project.

3) Power Supply - Again, it depends on you. You can use any 5-volt power supply available but since an ATX power supply is just lying around at home, I conveniently used it instead.

4) CAT5 UTP Cable - Only because of the wires. I want my wires to be color-coded.

5) Breadboard - If you want a solderless-free project.

6) Soldering Iron/Lead - For soldering the pins you would need to connect your CAT5 UTP cable to, but if you still have the flat ribbon cable then good for you. Might as well use that to make it easier.

7) Cutter, Phillips/Flathead screwdrivers - For dismantling purposes.

Step 1: Prepare your power supply.

Again, it depends on you. You can use any 5-volt power supply available but since an ATX power supply is just lying around the house, it would be pretty convenient to use it here. However, if you just have the power supply (without a motherboard), to activate it you need to short two wires, BLACK and GREEN as shown on the image. Connect these two wires and your power supply is then activated.

Comments

[acuadras]

NetBeans is normal for a long afternoon to compile the MoppyDesk

[compukit]

How many drives you can on an adruino to close and which pins do you have to use.
Thanks in advance.

[compukit]

hi when i try to run the program in netbeans noting wil happen and i got this
ant -f C:\\Users\\game-laptop\\Downloads\\FD2U3TRH2MYKAEN\\MoppyDesk run
init:
Deleting: C:\Users\game-laptop\Downloads\FD2U3TRH2MYKAEN\MoppyDesk\build\built-jar.properties
deps-jar:
Updating property file: C:\Users\game-laptop\Downloads\FD2U3TRH2MYKAEN\MoppyDesk\build\built-jar.properties
compile:
run:
apr 29, 2013 11:44:05 AM java.util.prefs.WindowsPreferences
WARNING: Could not open/create prefs root node Software\JavaSoft\Prefs at root 0x80000002. Windows RegCreateKeyEx(...) returned error code 5.
java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: no rxtxSerial in java.library.path thrown while loading gnu.io.RXTXCommDriver
Exception in thread "AWT-EventQueue-0" java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: no rxtxSerial in java.library.path
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary(ClassLoader.java:1860)
at java.lang.Runtime.loadLibrary0(Runtime.java:845)
at java.lang.System.loadLibrary(System.java:1084)
at gnu.io.CommPortIdentifier.(CommPortIdentifier.java:123)
at moppydesk.MoppyMainWindow.updateComSelectionMenu(MoppyMainWindow.java:55)
at moppydesk.MoppyMainWindow.(MoppyMainWindow.java:43)
at moppydesk.MoppyUI.startup(MoppyUI.java:19)
at org.jdesktop.application.Application$1.run(Application.java:171)
at java.awt.event.InvocationEvent.dispatch(InvocationEvent.java:251)
at java.awt.EventQueue.dispatchEventImpl(EventQueue.java:727)
at java.awt.EventQueue.access$200(EventQueue.java:103)
at java.awt.EventQueue$3.run(EventQueue.java:688)
at java.awt.EventQueue$3.run(EventQueue.java:686)
at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
at java.security.ProtectionDomain$1.doIntersectionPrivilege(ProtectionDomain.java:76)
at java.awt.EventQueue.dispatchEvent(EventQueue.java:697)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpOneEventForFilters(EventDispatchThread.java:242)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEventsForFilter(EventDispatchThread.java:161)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEventsForHierarchy(EventDispatchThread.java:150)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(EventDispatchThread.java:146)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(EventDispatchThread.java:138)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.run(EventDispatchThread.java:91)
how can i fix this

[Analogue-Chick]

Have you copied everything on the MoppyDesk.rar? You should copy everything, download the MoppyDesk.rar located at the bottom of this 'ible. Also, download this version of NetBeans, JDK 7u4 with NetBeans 7.1.2. Could also be some compatibility issue.

[compukit]

yes the program is now working only the flopy drivers dont turn if i coneckt pin 11 and 12.
so if i run te program the flopy drive dont do enny thing.
is it not posibel to use in stad of a floppy a harddisk bekose i have lost of ide and scusi disk hire dowing noting :)
thnx

[agis68]

wow really amazing and amusing....

[micropuller]

I've been wanting to try this for a long time. Got it to work without any real problems. I used steppermotors instead of floppydrives and changed your code a bit so they won't change direction. Thanks for your very clear instructable!

[Drewseph]

I got mine working perfectly a while back, thanks for the Instructable :)

[Sadiek]

What if there is a pin at position 3? I've tested them as you instructed and they don't seem to work. Do you have any solution for this problem? The drives I tested that didn't have a pin at position 3 work fine, but with a pin at position 3 don't.

[GlitchBob]

What's the best way to setup the breadboard so that the connections can go in to one area, and back out to the arduino, or at the very least all the grounding taken care of? I'm very much a n00b at this, although I've set up 5 (nearly 6) floppy drives thus far... I'd like to make use of the breadboard to clean up the mess of wiring.

[The nerdling]

i cant get it to work, when i click play nothing pops up

[The nerdling]

got the window open now i cant here anything

[Analogue-Chick]

Sorry if I wasn't able to answer your questions promptly. Did you solve this problem?

[The nerdling]

nah, havnt tried getting it to work in a while

[Drewseph]

I don't really want to use an ATX power supply, so how would I make or where would I find a five volt power supply? Thanks in advance.

[Analogue-Chick]

It's harder without the molex connector, otherwise you can use about any power supply available that can provide 5 volts like USB port, phone and iPod chargers...

[The nerdling]

usb port or an old phone charger

[The nerdling]

wicked

[shostakovich]

thax...

[rimar2000]

lOl

Thanks for sharing!

[Analogue-Chick]

Not a prob. :)

[kenbob]

This is the geekiest thing I have seen in a long time. I am smiling ear to ear - Great job!

[Analogue-Chick]

Thank you!