Paweł Zadrożniak, aka Silent, created The Floppotron, the best new musical instrument in current reminiscence. Here is it enjoying Through the Fire and Flames from Dragonforce.
Here’s some background:
How does it work? The precept is straightforward. Every gadget with an electrical motor is ready to generate a sound. Scanners and floppy drives use stepper motors to maneuver the pinnacle with sensors which scans the picture or performs learn/write operations on a magnetic disk. The sound generated by a motor is dependent upon driving pace. The greater the frequency, the better the pitch. Hard disks use a magnet and a coil to tilt the pinnacle. When voltage is equipped for lengthy sufficient, the pinnacle hurries up and hits the certain making the „drum hit” sound. The disk head coil will also be used as a speaker to play tones and even music, however… that may be too simple and too apparent.
Every column of 8 floppy drives is linked to at least one 8-channel controller constructed on ATMega16 microcontroller. One controller acts as one voice with envelope simulation – the upper the amount, the extra drives are enjoying. This permits to make ADSR-like form and simulate a musical instrument, like a piano (exponential decay) or string instrument (sine, „vibrato”). The boards which had been made a few years in the past, had been designed as a stand-alone „gamers” with non-compulsory USB-to-UART bridge and was not supposed to be chained. My purpose was to re-use previous stuff and get the job carried out as quick as doable, so I used the on-board ISP (which actually is a SPI interface) connector to hyperlink 8 drivers in a SPI chain. Long SPI chain with unidirectional communication just isn’t an instance good and dependable design, but it surely didn’t require any hardware modification and took a minute to construct a controller community, so let’s name it… adequate for this sort of challenge.
Take on Me
Game of Thrones
• Through the Fire and Flames (YouTube / Paweł Zadrożniak)
https://boingboing.net/2017/09/26/the-floppotron-reclaimed-comp.html
