The head assembly is moved back and forth in small steps and each of those steps make a click. It’s the latter, stepper motor which makes that specific FDD seek sound. One in the middle of the drive which spins the disk around and a second one driving the linear mechanism which slides the head across the disk radius. The data is stored by the magnetic head being moved over the spinning disk surface which incorporates two motors. Floppy disk drive wallĪ floppy disk contains a magnetic disk inside which is read and written by the drive (FDD). If you’re wandering why there is a Bluetooth-enabled chip – I’ll explain it too, but let’s talk about how the sound is created first.
#Silent start nita driver#
The controller consists of a common MCU board with Nordic nRF52832 chip and a driver boards specific to the „instrument”, like floppy drive string, flatbed scanner or a hard drive. Those messages are picked by controllers which will turn the digital information into a sound by driving the electric motors or moving the hard disk heads. The gateway, protocol and reasoning is described in further section. It receives MIDI data and converts that data to RS-485-based internal protocol which can encapsulate MIDI and some extra stuff.
#Silent start nita Pc#
The gateway is a custom nRF52 microcontroller based device which sits between the PC with MIDI adapter and the network of „instrument” controllers. Those events are send from the computer to the gateway using USB to MIDI adapter. MIDI does not carry any actual audio data, but just short events, like pressing a piano key or twisting a control knob – you can think of it as a digital form of sheet music. A melody is encoded as a sequence od MIDI events, the same format as all digital synthesizers use. To make the old computer hardware play, we need a set of electronic controllers mentioned before but also a proper music (musical sequence) to play. Here’s a simplified schematic od the machine. To explain how the system works, I’ll go through the overview first and then will get into details of each individual block. It’s still a hobby project made after hours and not something commercial or mass produced, so you will find some nice solution as well as some janky, quick-and-dirty ones – and that’s the beauty of hobby projects. While making the new Floppotron, one of the main priorities (if not the main) was finishing it in reasonable time. The machine evolved into a relatively large system with multiple custom circuit boards and 3D-printed parts. Sounds simple? In principle, yes, but it gets complicated in a larger scale. A sequence of those noises and tones makes music – just like with the real instruments. constant 440hz tone which corresponds to A4 note in music) at a specific point in time. Those controllers are connected in a network and can be commanded from the computer to make a specific device (e.g. All of the devices present in the „orchestra” contain either stepper motors or moving heads (in case of hard drives), which are driven by custom electronic circuits – controllers. and turned into music – which usually involves some level of abuse. Every mechanical device with electric motor or any other moving parts makes noise as a side effect. To avoid scaring the non-technical readers away at the beginning, I’ll start with the basic operating principles and explain where these sounds come from. 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. 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.
It has its own „studio” space and became a relatively complex device.
My noise-making contraption grew a little bit since last update. 512 floppy disk drives, 4 scanners and 16 hard disk drives. Here it is! The bigger and better Floppotron 3.0.
#Silent start nita upgrade#
After a long time it’s time for a big upgrade of my computer hardware orchestra.
0 kommentar(er)
