The programmer ironically called his video Smells Like Nerd Spirit.
Polish programmer Paweł Zadrożniak used 64 floppy drives, eight hard disks and two scanners to build a “computer hardware orchestra” called Floppotron.
Paweł noticed that every device with an electric motor can generate a sound. Scanners and floppy drives use stepper motors to move the head with sensors. The sound generated by a motor depends on driving speed. The higher the frequency, the greater the pitch. Hard disks use a magnet and a coil to tilt the head. When voltage is supplied for long enough, the head speeds up and hits the bound making the “drum hit” sound.
“The disk head coil can also be used as a speaker to play tones or even music, but… that would be too easy and too obvious,” Paweł writes in his blog.
The Floppotron consists of 8 columns of 8 floppy drives connected to an ATMega16 controller. Each column is responsible for one channel. The hardware orchestra is “directed” by a program written in Python 2.7.
“I wrote it mostly on some boring lectures when I was still studying at the university, so it’s a one big mess, but… at least it does the job,” Paweł says.
Besides a cover of Nirvana’s hit, the programmer already recorded his versions of tunes from Star Wars and Hawaii Five-0 series.
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