Floppotron 3.0 - Computer Hardware Orchestra

US Classic Queen on 512 floppy disk drives, 16 hard disks and 4 scanners. 04/07/22

We covered version 2 of the Floppotron a while back, and you may have guessed from the title it's had an upgrade! It now features 512 floppy disk drives, 16 hard disks and 4 scanners of noise making...goodness? The make up and design has been detailed extensively on the makers blog post, in addition to a full hardware run down. Here's are some excerpts from the blog:

After a long time it's time for a big upgrade of my computer hardware orchestra. Here it is! The bigger and better Floppotron 3.0. 512 floppy disk drives, 4 scanners and 16 hard disk drives.

My noise-making contraption grew a little bit since last update. It has its own „studio" space and became a relatively complex device. There is a ton of cables, a lot of custom electronic circuits, but the whole power is in the firmware which has been rewritten from scratch. In this article I'll try to explain the principle of operation, how it's built, how the whole system works, what's still missing, provide some more technical details for nerds and answer the most commonly asked questions.

The blog post goes on to explain how the Floppotron V3 works and how it's all put together. See the full post here: http://silent.org.pl/home/2022/06/13/the-floppotron-3-0/

In addition some classic Queen, they've also covered the obligatory Star Wars Theme:

And finally here's the big unveil video:

It's just great to see a printer working properly! I'd love to see it replicating the human voice, 'talking piano style'.

What would you play on the Flopporton?

About the author [midierror]: midierror makes nifty Max For Live devices, innovative music hardware, award winning sample packs and hosts a podcast speaking to people in the music world.