Star wars theme played by a floppy disk hack. | Hacker News Reader

Star wars theme played by a floppy disk hack.

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72 pointscfontes27 comments

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.

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

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

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

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

That would be Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.

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

That is absolutely fantastic. Much better than the ol' star wars thing. I never thought I'd see floppy drives harmonising.

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

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

What's a floppy disk?

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.

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

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

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

(5.25" were 360kB and 1.2MB).

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...

For those who didn't stumbled upon it yet: http://superuser.com/q/231273/38447 (What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?)

Um isn't that the Imperial March?

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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