

Star wars theme played by a floppy disk hack. - cfontes
http://vodpod.com/watch/799407-hacked-floppy-disk-plays-star-wars-music-as-awesome-as-it-

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extension
Maybe this is the right time to pimp my "Super Mario Bro's theme for laser
engraver":

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fq4VLwLFXaE>

I'm very interested in the idea of electro-mechanical music. We've all heard
machines playing human instruments and machines synthesizing sound, but very
few machines built to be novel accoustic instruments in themselves.

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qeorge
This is amazing. I'd like to hear more about this, specifically what gave you
the idea and how you did it.

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extension
The story behind the laser itself is pretty interesting. It was largely built
by people at a hacklab in Toronto. Here's a writeup from another member:

<http://www.andrewkilpatrick.org/?p=laser_cutter>

During the build, we noticed the sound of the stepper motors was unusually
melodic. The sound it made while tracing an arc was inescapably musical.

One night, I just hacked up a Ruby script to translate a simple ASCII music
notation into movement commands. This is actually quite simple. Feed rate *
DPI gives you pitch and distance / feed rate is note duration. All the axes
are intersected to create a single list of movements. When multiple axes are
moving, a bit of trig is used to calculate the right feed rate.

The acceleration limits also have to be disabled on the machine.

Here is the code. It should work with any G-code based CNC machine:

<https://github.com/jedediah/lasermuzak>

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torme
If you haven't seen this yet, this is probably the best example of a hack like
this that I've seen. It was submitted for a contest that radiohead held, and I
believe was the winner (it takes about a minute to get rolling):

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmfHHLfbjNQ>

The sound of the scanner is pretty awesome.

And the original by radiohead in case you need some context.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ky1td3_6LY>

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zalew
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmoDLyiQYKw> phantom of the opera

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Xk
That would be Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.

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jobrahms
Actually, it's Toccata and Fugue in D Drive. Common mistake.

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unshift
direct link to the video: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4SCSGRVAQE>

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potomak
Listen to Queen Bohemian Rhapsody Old School Computer Remix
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ht96HJ01SE4>

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wladimir
What's a floppy disk?

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cfontes
Hum... born after 96 ?

It was the famous B:\ drive discs, they could keep 1.44Mb of data, yes that
stands for Megabytes

I had a game called Rex Nebular that was 25 discs :D hahaha it toke forever to
install.

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unshift
A: was the 3.5" 1.44MB micro floppy as pictured in the video, B: was the 5.25"
mini floppy

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cfontes
No way. A:\ mostly was for those big square ones that could only fit 750k and
were thin like a cardboard.

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warp
750k? That is a pretty uncommon "big square" disk.

(5.25" were 360kB and 1.2MB).

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Sandman
5.25 DD was 360 KB, and HD was 1.2 MB. However, there were also QD 5.25 disks
which held 720 KB. But there were no 750 KB disks.

Man, I feel so old right now just for knowing that...

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adaml_623
Um isn't that the Imperial March?

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pettazz
This would be more ominous if it played All Along The Watchtower.

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iwwr
Music coming out of an electric arc (no moving membrane).

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEeWtBAE5LY>

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zandorg
I did something similiar by switching on and off (with BASIC code) the relay
in a BBC B, which turns the tape machine on or off. It kind of goes clickety
click very rapidly.

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nhangen
For some reason, I still have a stack of floppies in my closet. Looks like I
found a potential weekend project :)

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Splines
I've heard PCM audio through the PC speaker, it'd be interesting to try
similar techniques with this setup.

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antirez
So PC shipped with a floppy _and_ a speaker only in order to be able to beep
while loading? :)

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whyleyc
It sounds like someone playing a Kazoo in the background whilst a floppy disk
is filmed

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cfontes
Crazy hack done by someone with a lot of free time and discipline :D

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stuff4ben
pffft...we used to do that on our 1541's back in the day.

