Musicbox V1

A cardboardbox and an idea

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Music gallery

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Link to OG Spinnercity

Hello everyone Andre here;
Like with many great project, you see a video and go: "i wanna do that too". And this one is no different. I saw a video of one of the biggest floppydrive music-machines on youtube (The Floppotron) and wanted to do the same. So i looked up what i need to do to create my own floppydrive music-machine and its not that complicated: A floppydrive, some powersource, wires to connect it all together and a controller to send signals to the floppydrive.

The first three parts are easy to get. A quick round of onlineshopping and its done. The controller is a bit more complicated. You can use a Arduino-board, RaspberryPi or even a selfmade one if you have the know-how (which i dont have XD). I recently started to use a RaspberryPi so the choise was simple. I got me a RaspberryPi Modell 1, installeda Linux Debian operationg system, looked up some tutorial and program i can use (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvM-eNblI84 and https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?f=41&t=69947) and started to connect it all together.

This was the result:

Star Wars - Imperial March

The program is quite simple to use. For your desired sound write a note, the pitch and the duration in a single line of code. The Program WiringPi will translate this code into a signal, which can be used by the floppydrive to produce the sound by moving its head with tiny stepmotor. By adding multible of those lines in a row you can produce music. And thats what a did for quite some time after the first succesfull test. I took requests from friends, wrote a few lines of code and recorded the results. At the same time the Musicbox got created too. A cardboardbox with a few holes cut in for the cables to go through. Simple but it keeps everything orderly in one place and doubles as a sound body to make the sound from the floppydrive louder.
Check out the music gallery for those recordings.