Arduino + Floppy = Music!

I recently got myself an Arduino UNO and did the usual first-time experiments with it (making an LED blink, moving a Servo motor and so on).

That got boring, fast. So I did the logical thing.  Try to connect the closest thing to me to the Arduino!
 Turns out I had a few floppies lying aroun.

First thing was to make sure they worked, so I wired them up to a computer and checked.

All of 'em worked.



Now that that was done, I connected the Arduino to the floppy via IDE cable and threw up some code to make the spindle motor move 'n' groove.

Worked nicely, though I programmed it to move automatically up and down, so that was boring... so I added a potentiometer for manual control.

It was then that I remembered watching a video on Youtube where floppies were utilised to play music!

After fumbling around for a while installing the necessary software for it, I finally managed to do this:

Success!

Not bad for a first try.

How it works (probably):

You load a midi (preferably multi-channel) with Java from your computer which sends the appropiate signals to the Arduino through USB. That's it.

Review:

Took a while to wire it all up and install all the software but it was definately worth it.

Original coding by Samm1Am

It's not music... it's better!