10 ms·

The Floppotron 3.0

1398 points by perakojotgenije 4y ago

ethanfinni 4y ago
There should be a special version of a Turing award for fun computing projects like this!
narven 4y ago
amazing work and pacience
gffrd 4y ago
This had me smiling the whole time … I love it when projects go so far beyond beyond what was intended, well beyond where most people would have stopped or lost interest, and in to the land of the absurd and hilarious. This reminds me of the joy in the fun things I've done just for the sake of taking them as far as they could be taken. Thanks for sharing.
- tirwander 4y ago
  I feel like it's this little shit that really bring happiness.
- anyfoo 4y ago
  You will love Tom7/suckerpinch's stuff then, if you don't know him already. Here's a good one for the start, though really, they are all fantastic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar9WRwCiSr0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar9WRwCiSr0
  - gffrd 4y ago
    I had no idea who Tom7 is, and now that I do, you're right: I LOVE this stuff. Thank you! What an excellent example of using non-standard formats to explore interesting concepts and be exposed to different ways of thinking. This is what high school should be like. Actually, what am I saying: this is what it feels like to tinker with your pals in high school. And now I'm looking at SIGBOVIK, Annals of Improbable Research, CMU's "ASSOCIATION FOR COMPUTATIONAL HERESY," the Ig Nobel prize … what a wonderful rabbit trail you've sent me down.
  - kibwen 4y ago
    "NaN Gates and Flip FLOPS" is my personal favorite: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5TFDG-y-EHs https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5TFDG-y-EHs
    - hermitdev 4y ago
      Wow, that is amazingly absurd. I love it!
  - naikrovek 4y ago
    that guy is amazing and i fanboy out a little when I think about what i'd talk to him about if I ever met him. he's not even famous, he's just everything I want to be. i'm not as smart as him, or as clever, or as educated, or ... etc.
  - devenvdev 4y ago
    Came here to post this ↑ Tom7's Uppestcase and Lowestcase Letters [1] is one of the most entertaining (and educational) experiences I had lately [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLRdruqQfRk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLRdruqQfRk
  - cbm-vic-20 4y ago
    "Tetris is an inventory management survival horror game."
  - tambourine_man 4y ago
    This was amazing, thanks for sharing. Edit: his whole channel is awesome, what a great find. He also sorted all of StarWars dialog, manually, as one does: “This is the Special Edition to troll Han-shot-first purists. Everyone knows the orig is the most legit.” Someone who really invests in his trollage.
  - 5- 4y ago
    tom7 is great! his perhaps lesser known, but fantastic and way more interactive creation is his icfpc'06 work, http://www.boundvariable.org/ http://www.boundvariable.org/ i don't know of any worthy english-language writeups, perhaps they will be posted in replies to this comment.
  - alexb_ 4y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio Harder Drive is one of my favorite videos.
- kilroy123 4y ago
  Absolutely, the same.
- ryan77627 4y ago
  Made an account just to say this: anyone who hasnt heard of the SIGBOVIK conferences should look up the minutes from this year and read through some of the papers submitted, maybe even go through a few years. And yes, Tom7 is a frequent contributor :)
superb-owl 4y ago
This is incredible. There's something about the convergence of technology and art that I find super satisfying.
injidup 4y ago
I saw a version of this over 30 years ago. One the geek kids in our group who could program assembly found it a giggle to turn the computer lab into a musical instrument via floppy drive seek commands. Next trick...turn a Tesla into a musical instrument via the motor drives.
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  > Next trick...turn a Tesla into a musical instrument via the motor drives. Renault did it some years ago to demonstrate how much control they have on their F1 engine drivetrain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRXwWbo_mX0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRXwWbo_mX0
- rzzzt 4y ago
  Siemens Taurus locomotive engines have some musicality hidden in the power switching section: https://youtu.be/-SDYdHzT7Qw https://youtu.be/-SDYdHzT7Qw
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    I wonder what's actually making the noise. PWM on the transformer windings, or PWM on the motor windings themselves, or did they just use speakers? I have so many questions.
    - rzzzt 4y ago
      Overhead power lines are 15 kV, 16⅔ Hz AC in Austria; the drivetrain is of the variable voltage-variable frequency (VVVF) kind, and conversion to three-phase power is done using solid state components. Comments say these switching elements (IGBT or GTO thyristors) apply lower frequency to the motor at start, then gradually increase once it is in motion. So I'd say the "glorified coil whine" comes mainly from the motor windings. More singing: - https://youtu.be/llBI_L21d3g https://youtu.be/llBI_L21d3g - https://www.reddit.com/r/trains/comments/ilxxt7/these_trains_in_japan_nicknamed_singing_trains/g3wr668/ https://www.reddit.com/r/trains/comments/ilxxt7/these_trains...
  - 4y ago
loudthing 4y ago
That retro looking CLI gui is pretty slick.
- layer8 4y ago
  TUI, not CLI.
  - loudthing 4y ago
    You must be fun at parties. Edit: :P
alkaloid 4y ago
I'm curious as to why the resettable breaker for each eight drives . . . I presume this was trial-and-error, but how could someone tell that the current is too much for a disk drive which is being, uh, overdriven (to make noise!)? Or maybe this was a "just in case" situation...? So cool . . .
- MBCook 4y ago
  He must have enough experience by now of knowing how floppies can fail (especially when doing something so odd) to know it’s useful. Probably just hard won knowledge that almost no one else would ever have. Kind of cool in a way.
- porbelm 4y ago
  The video has clips from the previous iterations, in remembrance, and one of them shows quite a bit of smoke in the room...
recursivedoubts 4y ago
not all heroes wear capes, but this guy needs a cape
YakBizzarro 4y ago
My question is: where did he find 512 floppy drives??
- Forge36 4y ago
  eBay? "Floppy drive Lot"
supportengineer 4y ago
Amazing project. I remember having a C64 program that would play a tune using the 1541 disk drive.
- einr 4y ago
  See also: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=89362 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=89362 -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zprSxCMlECA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zprSxCMlECA A demo, including music and graphics, written for the 1541 disk drive -- no, it is not a C64 demo, it runs entirely on the 1541 (which has a 6502 CPU and some amount of RAM in it)
- anyfoo 4y ago
  I remember that. There used to be all kinds of warnings about possibly damaging your drive and what not, that, retrospectively, were mostly overblown. But I guess the computer magazines of the time (almost my only source for this stuff back then) didn't want any liability in the rare case when. I also fondly remember one program that made the drive's red access LED pulsate really softly on and off. Not only was I blown away that the drive can do that (I didn't know what pulse width modulation was back then), LEDs were still somewhat new enough at the time that I might not have seen a softly pulsating one before. It was really pretty.
- vintermann 4y ago
  LFT, a Swedish demoscene guy fairly well known on HN due to his impressive exploits, has some lower key projects as well. One is for playing live music on the C64, and in this video he hooked up a 1541 as well: https://youtu.be/mbhQ36bd870 https://youtu.be/mbhQ36bd870
- jansan 4y ago
  Yes, it was "My Bonnie is Over the Ocean". We played it only once or twice because we were afraid that this could break the disk drive and there just was no money for a new one :)
benoliver999 4y ago
I love that he made it use MIDI, it makes it so flexible
frizkie 4y ago
I want very badly to listen to a bunch of old N64 game tracks on this thing. This is the stuff of legends, nice work Paweł!
shdon 4y ago
I love it for sheer we-can-do-it-just-for-the-heck-of-it-ness, though I admit I'm a bit nostalgic for Floppotron 2 as the new one sounds a bit too smooth for my tastes, losing some of that charm.
sigmonsays 4y ago
i'm pleasantly surprised and amazed. I've seen these through the years but the sound quality on this is absolutely amazing!
- criddell 4y ago
  I’d love a spatial audio recording. I’d love to hear it as if I were sitting in the middle of it.
mgdlbp 4y ago
Awesome, the 2.0 decommissioning last week had scared. There's a spectacular variety of ways that music has been made in unconventional electromechanical ways--on the head motors of floppy drives 3.5", 5.25", and 8", on hard drive voice coils, scanner carriage motors, steppers wherever the're found in CNC devices, dot-matrix printheads, pulsed laser cutters, tesla coils, all the way back to radio interference generated by the IBM 1401 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPk8MVEmiTI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPk8MVEmiTI). The 1401 video I actually saw in an older related HN submission; lots of comments linking out to different examples in these threads. Here are a couple, someone might be able to aggregate a bunch more: "Eye of the Tiger" played on a dot-matrix printer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9286555 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9286555 (2015, 62 comments) "Imperial March" on a single floppy drive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2230849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2230849 (2011, 27 comments) Both the news site and original video of the second submission are lost to time, but luckily our saviour (of web content) Brewster Kahle has graced us with a copy in the Internet Archive.[1] The Wayback Machine also remembers a time when YouTube recommendations bore greater relevance--those on the archived video page from 2011[2] are entirely of videos of computer hardware music. Some might even still be up today. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/0id_/wayback-fakeurl.archive.org/yt/X4SCSGRVAQE https://web.archive.org/web/0id_/wayback-fakeurl.archive.org... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/0/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4SCSGRVAQE https://web.archive.org/web/0/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... "Imperial March" was also what was played on the first incarnation of the Floppotron, with an impressively full sound from only two floppy drives (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHJOz_y9rZE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHJOz_y9rZE). And perhaps related are those videos of the pleasingly periodic percussion of uncontrolled devices like (broken) washing machines, electronic typewriters, and air conditioners.
- MBCook 4y ago
  I just randomly saw 2.0 decommissioning video last week. I hoped he was working on a new one (no idea it was ready!) but figured it may just be the end of the Floppytron era. Very happy to see this.
- rkagerer 4y ago
  That "Eye of the Tiger" on the dot matrix is beautiful.
mNovak 4y ago
Those floppy stacks sound delightfully like a harpsichord
pkaye 4y ago
They should add SSDs to the mix.
- ruined 4y ago
  an ssd would greatly improve playback time. seriously, a single modern nvme drive could probably beat this whole setup. so pointless...
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Those would be exceedingly well-suited to some John Cage.
Vladimof 4y ago
Probably the best one of it's kind, so far.
justin_oaks 4y ago
This reminds me of the Device Orchestra channel on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDwMh0pu1iSXeKx7qmqjIQA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDwMh0pu1iSXeKx7qmqjIQA
- nicce 4y ago
  Fascinating, why I have never seen this one.
mftb 4y ago
This is brilliant! It reminds me of the anecdote Steven Levy relates in Hackers about Steve Dompier of the Homebrew Computer Club writing a program for the Altair that created music through electrical interference[0]. Awesome! [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers%3A_Heroes_of_the_Computer_Revolution#Part_Two:_Hardware_Hackers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers%3A_Heroes_of_the_Compu...
- jecel 4y ago
  Here is a video of a recreation of that using an actual Altair: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EPmWvqZ0Rw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EPmWvqZ0Rw
Agingcoder 4y ago
This is utterly insane, and absolutely amazing.
adamredwoods 4y ago
Wow. How loud is it? Also, why didn't he use any SSDs? (j/k)
- Forge36 4y ago
  The clicking noise was probably too quiet
  - kube-system 4y ago
    They'd be perfect for playing the rests.
robbomacrae 4y ago
I've often wished there was a way programming could produce art as a by product. That way we could see something more tangible for our efforts, have a landmark system for help recalling it all, and show progress to our non technical family members. This has made me think that making music as a by product would also be pretty neat.. being able to hear different sounds for different functions would be a much more intuitive way of inspecting the overall health and performance of your system than trudging through logs. If anyone knows of anything like this I would be happy to pay for it!
- StillBored 4y ago
  I guess you just need a PC from the early/mid 1990's with a soundblaster/clone sound card. Those cards overwhelmingly didn't have good power filters on their audio amps/etc and when the gain was turned up a bit you could hear the ISA/PCI bus noise. I remember my PC made very distinct noises when scrolling text, compiling, and various other operations. I vaguly remember a reading somewhere a couple years ago that someone had hooked up a click noise to linux syscalls and context switches for this basic purpose. I just wish machines still had disk I/O leds. My laptop (a dell) is one of the last machines I've seen with a disk activity led, because it switches the charge led to disk activity with a fn key combination. Also, if you want satisfaction there are various industries where computers are used to control mechanical devices. I worked in one where a large robot was being controlled by our software. Nothing more exciting than writing some code and hearing that think whirl and clunk away. Or somewhat frequently banging against end stops and the like when we had bugs.
- nikanj 4y ago
  Are you familiar with the demo scene?
  - robbomacrae 4y ago
    A little. Isn't the point of the demo to be the visual? Which to be fair, is like how the original post purpose is the music itself. But I was thinking something that happened as a happy accidental extra result of whatever you're doing with auto generated visual representations of how your code fits together like some Escher contraption.
user3939382 4y ago
I would predict that he's either single or his wife is rolling her eyes :D I LOVE it
- zackkitzmiller 4y ago
  Ahh yes. The two male companionship choices. Single, or married to a woman annoyed with his hobbies.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
jonstewart 4y ago
Someone get this man a daisywheel printer!
kinnth 4y ago
I've never seen anything like this, nor will I ever see it again. Thank you. Please gift this to a museum when you're ready!
listenfaster 4y ago
Bravo. Anyone else destroy their friend's Commodore 1541 running drive songs?
mikehollinger 4y ago
It's like a new kind of pipe organ. I love it. :-)
Maursault 4y ago
There's just too much time involved here. How many man-decades? It's because of the hardware. You have to appreciate anyone that would take the time to get one floppy working. One. Someone should virtualize all this for him so he has time for other things.
- WesolyKubeczek 4y ago
  Is this hobby-shaming? O_o
  - Maursault 4y ago
    By having an idea of the often frustrating labor involved in working on floppy drives, and being astounded by the sheer volume of work and time involved revealed by and culminating in a short video of a performance, and showing concern for the artist not being able to, you know, have time to sleep, eat, fap, etc., you somehow think I may be "shaming" what you call his "hobby?" No, of course not, but I will shame your straw man for the fallacy that it is, and I will shame your inaccurate and insulting labelling of a mechanical and digital many-threat masterpiece as a "hobby."
givemeethekeys 4y ago
It's stuff like this that makes me question the meaning of life and the point of "worthwhile pursuits". Pure art. I hope this ends up in a museum.
softcactus 4y ago
With this many floppies capable of creating discrete tones, I bet you could synthesize human speech. Running a Fourier Transform for some speech clip and then having each floppy play a different frequency.
- fennecfoxy 4y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBEL3YVzMwk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBEL3YVzMwk
  - softcactus 4y ago
    Yep! Exactly like this!
- durnygbur 4y ago
  This is the future.
  - 867-5309 4y ago
    Floptimus Prime
reaperducer 4y ago
The earliest iteration of this sort of thing that I know of is the Commodore 1541 being programmed to play Bicycle Built for Two. Are there earlier examples?
- 7402 4y ago
  It's not exactly the same but in the early 1970s PDP-8 computers could play music by generating radio frequency interference in a manner that could be picked up by a nearby AM radio. The sound was not mechanically generated, but it had the same hacker spirit to it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMsyvBxEcSc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMsyvBxEcSc
- krallja 4y ago
  In 1948, Alan Turing programmed a diagnostic loudspeaker (“the hooter”) in the Manchester Baby to play different tones: https://spectrum.ieee.org/alan-turing-how-his-universal-machine-became-a-musical-instrument https://spectrum.ieee.org/alan-turing-how-his-universal-mach...
- mdp2021 4y ago
  Aged 11, around 1982, Richard David "Aphex Twin" James used a (per se mute) Sinclair ZX81 to have the (video) connected television produce sound through video signals; it is not clear if he also coded music using that trick. He would buy his first synth the following year.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
LegitShady 4y ago
Not exactly the same thing but it reminds me of James Houston's cover of Radiohead's Nude on hard drives, a dot matrix printer, a scanner, and a sinclair ZX Spectrum. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmfHHLfbjNQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmfHHLfbjNQ This says 14 years ago.
- pygy_ 4y ago
  That rendition is brilliant
globalnode 4y ago
this was amazing
wrycoder 4y ago
I think I'll just go home now...
sam537 4y ago
The internet can still be a beautiful place.
malikNF 4y ago
Love this!!! Thanks op! For some reason this reminded me of chiptunes ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf_p3-8fTo0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf_p3-8fTo0 [Pretty sure some of you will recognize some of these tunes] ) ---Edit-- There's more here if anyone's interested. http://keygenmusic.net/ http://keygenmusic.net/
kube-system 4y ago
I bet this sounds awesome in person. I hope this ends up in some sort of museum some day so I can hear it.
AceJohnny2 4y ago
By having his devices (say, the floppies) driven in columnar groups (controlling number of active devices for volume), did he accidentally create a phased array speaker?
- yetihehe 4y ago
  No, they are only enabled/disabled to run simultaneously. To create phased array, you would need to control phase (delay in time) of each drive separately. It could be probably done with this setup, but I don't see a good reason to do phased array using devices which do not emit clean enough sound.
tomcam 4y ago
Intonation surprisingly good!
nickwanninger 4y ago
Not long till can we have a GB of floppys on one table. Imagine!
koyao 4y ago
But why?
- mdp2021 4y ago
  As they said of Engelbart. Not only the demo has its technical worth: that "synth" can sound amazingly.
peterkelly 4y ago
This needs an old-school theatre organ console hooked up to it
allset_ 4y ago
Love the Floppotron, glad to see it alive and well! Keep it up!
bencollier49 4y ago
This is incredible and what a project! But the retrocomputing enthusiast inside me winces a little at all that lovely old hardware being wrecked..
niffydroid 4y ago
If you like things like this then check out "look mum no computer" he does similar things https://youtube.com/c/LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER https://youtube.com/c/LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER
- magic123_ 4y ago
  Yes ! He's really talented and inventive, and if you live in the UK I highly recommend paying a visit to the museum he created: https://this-museum-is-not-obsolete.com/ https://this-museum-is-not-obsolete.com/
lqet 4y ago
I would pay significant amounts of money to see a live performance of this contraption.
- spread_love 4y ago
  This would sell out instantly in Yuppie Brooklyn (I use that term endearingly) at at least $40/ticket. The real challenge would be moving it from tour stop to tour stop without breaking it, if I had to guess.
- agentbellnorm 4y ago
  Was thinking the same! They should do a tour where they play music but also talk about how it all works, q&a etc.
  - Phileosopher 4y ago
    I'm fairly certain HN has almost enough people that they could make it a viable venue (geography-contextually, naturally). Add some meme marketing to it with some vague overtones about making the world love something they didn't love before and it'll get memorialized as a TEDtalk.
    - s0rce 4y ago
      The computer history museum in Mountain View should host.
Ice_cream_suit 4y ago
So very cool ! (Pardon my immature gushing, but it really is very, very cool !)
Yizahi 4y ago
Pawel is doing amazing work, no questions. But I also like to promote lesser scale projects, like this one for example (only 5 sound sources): Floppy Music Robo-Band. Rondo alla Turca (cover) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICMXnnb_xqI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICMXnnb_xqI
AndrianV 4y ago
If you can read any MIDI file, you should seriously consider hosting a twitch broadcast where subscribers may upload their own MIDI files and hear them played live by the floppotron.
- Gys 4y ago
  I also thought the MIDI makes this complex system very accessible. However: > Even if there is an existing MIDI for a specific song, re-arranging it for The Floppotron is still a time consuming process. Every „instrument” in the setup have its limits and the track must fit the note range it can play. Making a track sound good on the stacks of FDDs or a scanner usually involves a lot of tweaking. > Making one arrangement for 3.0 usually takes me 3-4 evenings, which is a little longer than for the older Floppotron 2.0. Maybe there could be an kind of offline version that people can use to tweak their own MIDI and ultimately play it on the real machine?
dbqpdb 4y ago
This should honestly be in an art gallery
afroisalreadyin 4y ago
I am in awe of the completeness and entertainment factor of this thing; you have to admire the dedication that went into bringing it to such a level. Probably the most entertaining thing I've ever seen done with computer hardware.

The Floppotron 3.0

ethanfinni 4y ago

There should be a special version of a Turing award for fun computing projects like this!

narven 4y ago

amazing work and pacience

gffrd 4y ago

This had me smiling the whole time … I love it when projects go so far beyond beyond what was intended, well beyond where most people would have stopped or lost interest, and in to the land of the absurd and hilarious. This reminds me of the joy in the fun things I've done just for the sake of taking them as far as they could be taken. Thanks for sharing.

tirwander 4y ago
I feel like it's this little shit that really bring happiness.
anyfoo 4y ago
You will love Tom7/suckerpinch's stuff then, if you don't know him already. Here's a good one for the start, though really, they are all fantastic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar9WRwCiSr0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar9WRwCiSr0
- gffrd 4y ago
  I had no idea who Tom7 is, and now that I do, you're right: I LOVE this stuff. Thank you! What an excellent example of using non-standard formats to explore interesting concepts and be exposed to different ways of thinking. This is what high school should be like. Actually, what am I saying: this is what it feels like to tinker with your pals in high school. And now I'm looking at SIGBOVIK, Annals of Improbable Research, CMU's "ASSOCIATION FOR COMPUTATIONAL HERESY," the Ig Nobel prize … what a wonderful rabbit trail you've sent me down.
- kibwen 4y ago
  "NaN Gates and Flip FLOPS" is my personal favorite: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5TFDG-y-EHs https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5TFDG-y-EHs
  - hermitdev 4y ago
    Wow, that is amazingly absurd. I love it!
- naikrovek 4y ago
  that guy is amazing and i fanboy out a little when I think about what i'd talk to him about if I ever met him. he's not even famous, he's just everything I want to be. i'm not as smart as him, or as clever, or as educated, or ... etc.
- devenvdev 4y ago
  Came here to post this ↑ Tom7's Uppestcase and Lowestcase Letters [1] is one of the most entertaining (and educational) experiences I had lately [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLRdruqQfRk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLRdruqQfRk
- cbm-vic-20 4y ago
  "Tetris is an inventory management survival horror game."
- tambourine_man 4y ago
  This was amazing, thanks for sharing. Edit: his whole channel is awesome, what a great find. He also sorted all of StarWars dialog, manually, as one does: “This is the Special Edition to troll Han-shot-first purists. Everyone knows the orig is the most legit.” Someone who really invests in his trollage.
- 5- 4y ago
  tom7 is great! his perhaps lesser known, but fantastic and way more interactive creation is his icfpc'06 work, http://www.boundvariable.org/ http://www.boundvariable.org/ i don't know of any worthy english-language writeups, perhaps they will be posted in replies to this comment.
- alexb_ 4y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio Harder Drive is one of my favorite videos.
kilroy123 4y ago
Absolutely, the same.
ryan77627 4y ago
Made an account just to say this: anyone who hasnt heard of the SIGBOVIK conferences should look up the minutes from this year and read through some of the papers submitted, maybe even go through a few years. And yes, Tom7 is a frequent contributor :)

superb-owl 4y ago

This is incredible. There's something about the convergence of technology and art that I find super satisfying.

injidup 4y ago

I saw a version of this over 30 years ago. One the geek kids in our group who could program assembly found it a giggle to turn the computer lab into a musical instrument via floppy drive seek commands. Next trick...turn a Tesla into a musical instrument via the motor drives.

qbasic_forever 4y ago
> Next trick...turn a Tesla into a musical instrument via the motor drives. Renault did it some years ago to demonstrate how much control they have on their F1 engine drivetrain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRXwWbo_mX0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRXwWbo_mX0
rzzzt 4y ago
Siemens Taurus locomotive engines have some musicality hidden in the power switching section: https://youtu.be/-SDYdHzT7Qw https://youtu.be/-SDYdHzT7Qw
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  I wonder what's actually making the noise. PWM on the transformer windings, or PWM on the motor windings themselves, or did they just use speakers? I have so many questions.
  - rzzzt 4y ago
    Overhead power lines are 15 kV, 16⅔ Hz AC in Austria; the drivetrain is of the variable voltage-variable frequency (VVVF) kind, and conversion to three-phase power is done using solid state components. Comments say these switching elements (IGBT or GTO thyristors) apply lower frequency to the motor at start, then gradually increase once it is in motion. So I'd say the "glorified coil whine" comes mainly from the motor windings. More singing: - https://youtu.be/llBI_L21d3g https://youtu.be/llBI_L21d3g - https://www.reddit.com/r/trains/comments/ilxxt7/these_trains_in_japan_nicknamed_singing_trains/g3wr668/ https://www.reddit.com/r/trains/comments/ilxxt7/these_trains...
- 4y ago

loudthing 4y ago

That retro looking CLI gui is pretty slick.

layer8 4y ago
TUI, not CLI.
- loudthing 4y ago
  You must be fun at parties. Edit: :P

alkaloid 4y ago

I'm curious as to why the resettable breaker for each eight drives . . . I presume this was trial-and-error, but how could someone tell that the current is too much for a disk drive which is being, uh, overdriven (to make noise!)? Or maybe this was a "just in case" situation...? So cool . . .

MBCook 4y ago
He must have enough experience by now of knowing how floppies can fail (especially when doing something so odd) to know it’s useful. Probably just hard won knowledge that almost no one else would ever have. Kind of cool in a way.
porbelm 4y ago
The video has clips from the previous iterations, in remembrance, and one of them shows quite a bit of smoke in the room...

recursivedoubts 4y ago

not all heroes wear capes, but this guy needs a cape

YakBizzarro 4y ago

My question is: where did he find 512 floppy drives??

Forge36 4y ago
eBay? "Floppy drive Lot"

supportengineer 4y ago

Amazing project. I remember having a C64 program that would play a tune using the 1541 disk drive.

einr 4y ago
See also: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=89362 https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=89362 -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zprSxCMlECA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zprSxCMlECA A demo, including music and graphics, written for the 1541 disk drive -- no, it is not a C64 demo, it runs entirely on the 1541 (which has a 6502 CPU and some amount of RAM in it)
anyfoo 4y ago
I remember that. There used to be all kinds of warnings about possibly damaging your drive and what not, that, retrospectively, were mostly overblown. But I guess the computer magazines of the time (almost my only source for this stuff back then) didn't want any liability in the rare case when. I also fondly remember one program that made the drive's red access LED pulsate really softly on and off. Not only was I blown away that the drive can do that (I didn't know what pulse width modulation was back then), LEDs were still somewhat new enough at the time that I might not have seen a softly pulsating one before. It was really pretty.
vintermann 4y ago
LFT, a Swedish demoscene guy fairly well known on HN due to his impressive exploits, has some lower key projects as well. One is for playing live music on the C64, and in this video he hooked up a 1541 as well: https://youtu.be/mbhQ36bd870 https://youtu.be/mbhQ36bd870
jansan 4y ago
Yes, it was "My Bonnie is Over the Ocean". We played it only once or twice because we were afraid that this could break the disk drive and there just was no money for a new one :)

benoliver999 4y ago

I love that he made it use MIDI, it makes it so flexible

frizkie 4y ago

I want very badly to listen to a bunch of old N64 game tracks on this thing. This is the stuff of legends, nice work Paweł!

shdon 4y ago

I love it for sheer we-can-do-it-just-for-the-heck-of-it-ness, though I admit I'm a bit nostalgic for Floppotron 2 as the new one sounds a bit too smooth for my tastes, losing some of that charm.

sigmonsays 4y ago

i'm pleasantly surprised and amazed. I've seen these through the years but the sound quality on this is absolutely amazing!

criddell 4y ago
I’d love a spatial audio recording. I’d love to hear it as if I were sitting in the middle of it.

mgdlbp 4y ago

Awesome, the 2.0 decommissioning last week had scared. There's a spectacular variety of ways that music has been made in unconventional electromechanical ways--on the head motors of floppy drives 3.5", 5.25", and 8", on hard drive voice coils, scanner carriage motors, steppers wherever the're found in CNC devices, dot-matrix printheads, pulsed laser cutters, tesla coils, all the way back to radio interference generated by the IBM 1401 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPk8MVEmiTI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPk8MVEmiTI). The 1401 video I actually saw in an older related HN submission; lots of comments linking out to different examples in these threads. Here are a couple, someone might be able to aggregate a bunch more: "Eye of the Tiger" played on a dot-matrix printer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9286555 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9286555 (2015, 62 comments) "Imperial March" on a single floppy drive: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2230849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2230849 (2011, 27 comments) Both the news site and original video of the second submission are lost to time, but luckily our saviour (of web content) Brewster Kahle has graced us with a copy in the Internet Archive.[1] The Wayback Machine also remembers a time when YouTube recommendations bore greater relevance--those on the archived video page from 2011[2] are entirely of videos of computer hardware music. Some might even still be up today. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/0id_/wayback-fakeurl.archive.org/yt/X4SCSGRVAQE https://web.archive.org/web/0id_/wayback-fakeurl.archive.org... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/0/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4SCSGRVAQE https://web.archive.org/web/0/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... "Imperial March" was also what was played on the first incarnation of the Floppotron, with an impressively full sound from only two floppy drives (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHJOz_y9rZE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHJOz_y9rZE). And perhaps related are those videos of the pleasingly periodic percussion of uncontrolled devices like (broken) washing machines, electronic typewriters, and air conditioners.

MBCook 4y ago
I just randomly saw 2.0 decommissioning video last week. I hoped he was working on a new one (no idea it was ready!) but figured it may just be the end of the Floppytron era. Very happy to see this.
rkagerer 4y ago
That "Eye of the Tiger" on the dot matrix is beautiful.

mNovak 4y ago

Those floppy stacks sound delightfully like a harpsichord

pkaye 4y ago

They should add SSDs to the mix.

ruined 4y ago
an ssd would greatly improve playback time. seriously, a single modern nvme drive could probably beat this whole setup. so pointless...
dredmorbius 4y ago
Those would be exceedingly well-suited to some John Cage.

Vladimof 4y ago

Probably the best one of it's kind, so far.

justin_oaks 4y ago

This reminds me of the Device Orchestra channel on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDwMh0pu1iSXeKx7qmqjIQA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDwMh0pu1iSXeKx7qmqjIQA

nicce 4y ago
Fascinating, why I have never seen this one.

mftb 4y ago

This is brilliant! It reminds me of the anecdote Steven Levy relates in Hackers about Steve Dompier of the Homebrew Computer Club writing a program for the Altair that created music through electrical interference[0]. Awesome! [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers%3A_Heroes_of_the_Computer_Revolution#Part_Two:_Hardware_Hackers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers%3A_Heroes_of_the_Compu...

jecel 4y ago
Here is a video of a recreation of that using an actual Altair: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EPmWvqZ0Rw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EPmWvqZ0Rw

Agingcoder 4y ago

This is utterly insane, and absolutely amazing.

adamredwoods 4y ago

Wow. How loud is it? Also, why didn't he use any SSDs? (j/k)

Forge36 4y ago
The clicking noise was probably too quiet
- kube-system 4y ago
  They'd be perfect for playing the rests.

robbomacrae 4y ago

I've often wished there was a way programming could produce art as a by product. That way we could see something more tangible for our efforts, have a landmark system for help recalling it all, and show progress to our non technical family members. This has made me think that making music as a by product would also be pretty neat.. being able to hear different sounds for different functions would be a much more intuitive way of inspecting the overall health and performance of your system than trudging through logs. If anyone knows of anything like this I would be happy to pay for it!

StillBored 4y ago
I guess you just need a PC from the early/mid 1990's with a soundblaster/clone sound card. Those cards overwhelmingly didn't have good power filters on their audio amps/etc and when the gain was turned up a bit you could hear the ISA/PCI bus noise. I remember my PC made very distinct noises when scrolling text, compiling, and various other operations. I vaguly remember a reading somewhere a couple years ago that someone had hooked up a click noise to linux syscalls and context switches for this basic purpose. I just wish machines still had disk I/O leds. My laptop (a dell) is one of the last machines I've seen with a disk activity led, because it switches the charge led to disk activity with a fn key combination. Also, if you want satisfaction there are various industries where computers are used to control mechanical devices. I worked in one where a large robot was being controlled by our software. Nothing more exciting than writing some code and hearing that think whirl and clunk away. Or somewhat frequently banging against end stops and the like when we had bugs.
nikanj 4y ago
Are you familiar with the demo scene?
- robbomacrae 4y ago
  A little. Isn't the point of the demo to be the visual? Which to be fair, is like how the original post purpose is the music itself. But I was thinking something that happened as a happy accidental extra result of whatever you're doing with auto generated visual representations of how your code fits together like some Escher contraption.

user3939382 4y ago

I would predict that he's either single or his wife is rolling her eyes :D I LOVE it

zackkitzmiller 4y ago
Ahh yes. The two male companionship choices. Single, or married to a woman annoyed with his hobbies.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

jonstewart 4y ago

Someone get this man a daisywheel printer!

kinnth 4y ago

I've never seen anything like this, nor will I ever see it again. Thank you. Please gift this to a museum when you're ready!

listenfaster 4y ago

Bravo. Anyone else destroy their friend's Commodore 1541 running drive songs?

mikehollinger 4y ago

It's like a new kind of pipe organ. I love it. :-)

Maursault 4y ago

There's just too much time involved here. How many man-decades? It's because of the hardware. You have to appreciate anyone that would take the time to get one floppy working. One. Someone should virtualize all this for him so he has time for other things.

WesolyKubeczek 4y ago
Is this hobby-shaming? O_o
- Maursault 4y ago
  By having an idea of the often frustrating labor involved in working on floppy drives, and being astounded by the sheer volume of work and time involved revealed by and culminating in a short video of a performance, and showing concern for the artist not being able to, you know, have time to sleep, eat, fap, etc., you somehow think I may be "shaming" what you call his "hobby?" No, of course not, but I will shame your straw man for the fallacy that it is, and I will shame your inaccurate and insulting labelling of a mechanical and digital many-threat masterpiece as a "hobby."

givemeethekeys 4y ago

It's stuff like this that makes me question the meaning of life and the point of "worthwhile pursuits". Pure art. I hope this ends up in a museum.

softcactus 4y ago

With this many floppies capable of creating discrete tones, I bet you could synthesize human speech. Running a Fourier Transform for some speech clip and then having each floppy play a different frequency.

fennecfoxy 4y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBEL3YVzMwk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBEL3YVzMwk
- softcactus 4y ago
  Yep! Exactly like this!
durnygbur 4y ago
This is the future.
- 867-5309 4y ago
  Floptimus Prime

reaperducer 4y ago

The earliest iteration of this sort of thing that I know of is the Commodore 1541 being programmed to play Bicycle Built for Two. Are there earlier examples?

7402 4y ago
It's not exactly the same but in the early 1970s PDP-8 computers could play music by generating radio frequency interference in a manner that could be picked up by a nearby AM radio. The sound was not mechanically generated, but it had the same hacker spirit to it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMsyvBxEcSc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMsyvBxEcSc
krallja 4y ago
In 1948, Alan Turing programmed a diagnostic loudspeaker (“the hooter”) in the Manchester Baby to play different tones: https://spectrum.ieee.org/alan-turing-how-his-universal-machine-became-a-musical-instrument https://spectrum.ieee.org/alan-turing-how-his-universal-mach...
mdp2021 4y ago
Aged 11, around 1982, Richard David "Aphex Twin" James used a (per se mute) Sinclair ZX81 to have the (video) connected television produce sound through video signals; it is not clear if he also coded music using that trick. He would buy his first synth the following year.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

LegitShady 4y ago

Not exactly the same thing but it reminds me of James Houston's cover of Radiohead's Nude on hard drives, a dot matrix printer, a scanner, and a sinclair ZX Spectrum. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmfHHLfbjNQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmfHHLfbjNQ This says 14 years ago.

pygy_ 4y ago
That rendition is brilliant

globalnode 4y ago

this was amazing

wrycoder 4y ago

I think I'll just go home now...

sam537 4y ago

The internet can still be a beautiful place.

malikNF 4y ago

Love this!!! Thanks op! For some reason this reminded me of chiptunes ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf_p3-8fTo0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf_p3-8fTo0 [Pretty sure some of you will recognize some of these tunes] ) ---Edit-- There's more here if anyone's interested. http://keygenmusic.net/ http://keygenmusic.net/

kube-system 4y ago

I bet this sounds awesome in person. I hope this ends up in some sort of museum some day so I can hear it.

AceJohnny2 4y ago

By having his devices (say, the floppies) driven in columnar groups (controlling number of active devices for volume), did he accidentally create a phased array speaker?

yetihehe 4y ago
No, they are only enabled/disabled to run simultaneously. To create phased array, you would need to control phase (delay in time) of each drive separately. It could be probably done with this setup, but I don't see a good reason to do phased array using devices which do not emit clean enough sound.

tomcam 4y ago

Intonation surprisingly good!

nickwanninger 4y ago

Not long till can we have a GB of floppys on one table. Imagine!

koyao 4y ago

But why?

mdp2021 4y ago
As they said of Engelbart. Not only the demo has its technical worth: that "synth" can sound amazingly.

peterkelly 4y ago

This needs an old-school theatre organ console hooked up to it

allset_ 4y ago

Love the Floppotron, glad to see it alive and well! Keep it up!

bencollier49 4y ago

This is incredible and what a project! But the retrocomputing enthusiast inside me winces a little at all that lovely old hardware being wrecked..

niffydroid 4y ago

If you like things like this then check out "look mum no computer" he does similar things https://youtube.com/c/LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER https://youtube.com/c/LOOKMUMNOCOMPUTER

magic123_ 4y ago
Yes ! He's really talented and inventive, and if you live in the UK I highly recommend paying a visit to the museum he created: https://this-museum-is-not-obsolete.com/ https://this-museum-is-not-obsolete.com/

lqet 4y ago

I would pay significant amounts of money to see a live performance of this contraption.

spread_love 4y ago
This would sell out instantly in Yuppie Brooklyn (I use that term endearingly) at at least $40/ticket. The real challenge would be moving it from tour stop to tour stop without breaking it, if I had to guess.
agentbellnorm 4y ago
Was thinking the same! They should do a tour where they play music but also talk about how it all works, q&a etc.
- Phileosopher 4y ago
  I'm fairly certain HN has almost enough people that they could make it a viable venue (geography-contextually, naturally). Add some meme marketing to it with some vague overtones about making the world love something they didn't love before and it'll get memorialized as a TEDtalk.
  - s0rce 4y ago
    The computer history museum in Mountain View should host.

Ice_cream_suit 4y ago

So very cool ! (Pardon my immature gushing, but it really is very, very cool !)

Yizahi 4y ago

Pawel is doing amazing work, no questions. But I also like to promote lesser scale projects, like this one for example (only 5 sound sources): Floppy Music Robo-Band. Rondo alla Turca (cover) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICMXnnb_xqI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICMXnnb_xqI

AndrianV 4y ago

If you can read any MIDI file, you should seriously consider hosting a twitch broadcast where subscribers may upload their own MIDI files and hear them played live by the floppotron.

Gys 4y ago
I also thought the MIDI makes this complex system very accessible. However: > Even if there is an existing MIDI for a specific song, re-arranging it for The Floppotron is still a time consuming process. Every „instrument” in the setup have its limits and the track must fit the note range it can play. Making a track sound good on the stacks of FDDs or a scanner usually involves a lot of tweaking. > Making one arrangement for 3.0 usually takes me 3-4 evenings, which is a little longer than for the older Floppotron 2.0. Maybe there could be an kind of offline version that people can use to tweak their own MIDI and ultimately play it on the real machine?

dbqpdb 4y ago

This should honestly be in an art gallery

afroisalreadyin 4y ago

I am in awe of the completeness and entertainment factor of this thing; you have to admire the dedication that went into bringing it to such a level. Probably the most entertaining thing I've ever seen done with computer hardware.