The Floppotron Performs ‘The Final Countdown” #MusicMonday

from The Floppotron Performs ‘The Final Countdown” #MusicMonday
by Kelly

The Floppotron is a floppy-driven wonder created by Pawel Zadrozniark. He’s done a great write-up of the build here!

Its rendition of the 1980s classic, ‘The Final Countdown’ is both super fun + impressive.

Scanner and disk head controllers share the same base with floppy controllers, but have a different „instrument interface”. For driving the coils, I used 2 push-pull outputs (H-bridge) built with discrete SMD MOSFETs. Scanner head controllers were built using of-the-shelf boards – an Arduino Uno (firmware also builds for ATMega328) and L298 breakout to save time needed to draw and etch the boards. PC interface (another Arduino board) receives the data over UART (USB-UART), buffers the messages and keeps the timings while passing packets to „musical instruments” over SPI interface, so a Windows hiccup will not affect the playback. It can also be driven by anything else like Raspberry Pi, Android smartphone (with USB-UART or UART-over-Bluetooth adapter) or another microcontroller.

Via laughingsquid

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