Polish engineer and YouTuber Paweł Zadrożniak updated Floppotron. Like its predecessors, version 3.0 uses a variety of enhancements that act as an electronic orchestra. The latest variant consists of at least 512 floppy drives, 16 HDDs and four flatbed scanners, compared to 64, eight and two respectively in the version 2.0 state.
This arrangement puts electronic motors and other moving parts of hardware to work that produces sound. Thanks to the combination of self-developed code, custom printed circuit boards, 3D printed parts and MIDI protocol, these can be used to make music.
In order to supply all these extra devices, Zadrożniak has also significantly increased the power supply. It has 16 5V/18A power supplies (1,440 W), as 512 floppy drives can consume up to 1,280 watts. In practice, however, there is little chance of all stations being deployed at the same time. For other components, Zadrożniak provides three 12V/8A PSUs (288W) that deliver a total of 1,728 watts.
While there are still some minor bugs and missing things to fix, the mechanic states that he wants to work on new videos above all else. In the future he may want to add other ‘tools’ such as a dot matrix printer besides automatic lighting.
If you want to know more about the technical working of Floppotron, you can visit Paweł’s blog (link).
Source: Pawel Zadrożniak (YouTube)
Source: Hardware Info
