- What's making the sound?
A: Stepper motors in the floppy drives. It's been done before, you can see other videos around Youtube of people doing songs with stepper motors, but the advantage to floppy drives is that the build is pretty uniform and most are easy to hear.
- How is this even possible?
The concept behind this is basically getting the stepper motor to operate a certain frequency (getting the motor to step a certain amount of times in a second) which generates a pitch. Then we arrange those pitches together and we get a song.
You need two signals (When it comes to floppy drives) to do this: a direction signal and a step signal. Direction controls which direction the motor will step and the step signal controls at what frequency and how long the motor operates.
- So, thats cool, but how the hell do you do that?
This is all do-able because of the software written by Sammy1Am!!! I DID NOT WRITE THE CODE. While I understood the concept, I spent a ton of time trying to code something decent to get the concept to work. I got something that was ok, but Sammy was providing a solution that was like, 395710355 times better. So I'm using his code, but with a couple tweaks for my own setup. Go check out his channel, its pretty badass:
http://www.youtube.com/user/Sammy1Am.
What this code does is convert a MIDI file into serial data packets and sends them over to my Arduino Duemilanove (Almost any Arduino will work!). The Arduino receives them and then sends the appropriate channel/floppy drive the information. My time is now spent tweaking stuff around in the code to make it specific to my setup and arranging music that is compatible with these "instruments".
