floppymusic

floppymusic is a small program that will play MIDI files via floppy disk drives. Don't believe me? See http://kingdread.de/~daniel/swars.mp4 for a small example with just one drive or search youtube to find other examples of people playing around with floppy drives.

Requirements

one or more floppy disk drives
Raspberry Pi
one or more MIDI files

Installation

adjust Makefile to your needs. The standard Makefile should be fine if you're using g++.
run make. If you have a Raspberry Pi 2 model B or newer, run make MODEL=PI2.
it will produce a single executable floppymusicin the current directory

Usage

To use floppymusic you have to configure it first. The only information it needs is which pins it should use. You can specify this in drives.cfg. It should look like

# The first number is the direction control; the second number is the step control
# multiple definitions are supported.
drive 1 2
drive 3 4

Where d1 is the pin connected to the direction input of the first drive, s1 is the pin connected to the stepper input of the first drive, ...

Note: The pin numbering may differ from library to library. floppymusic uses the "BCM" (Broadcom pin number) or "GPIO" number, not the ones WiringPi uses. You can find an overview on http://pinout.xyz/, use the number labelled "BCM".

When you've configured the drives, just run floppymusic and give it a MIDI file as argument:

./floppymusic StarWars.mid

Run floppymusic -h to get an overview of available command line options.

Playback & Hardware

You can use any pins you want, you just have to write it into the configuration file. Each drive needs 2 pins (direction & step) and one ground connection (you can use the same for every drive). See the pin configuration/tutorial for more information.

floppymusic uses the events of all tracks and channels. It works like a FIFO. If a note should be played and there is a free drive, this drive will play the note. If there is no free drive, the note will be discarded.

For optimal results you should consider preparing the MIDI files, e.g. singling out the track you want.

More resources

floppy drive pin configuration: http://pinouts.ru/Storage/InternalDisk_pinout.shtml
controller software for Arduino boards: https://github.com/SammyIAm/Moppy
(one of many) MIDI editor for linux: http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/
tutorial: http://bit.ly/1oQfpjV

License

floppymusic
Copyright (C) 2014 Daniel Schadt

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

Closing remarks

I've written this for personal use and I do not guarantee that it will work for you, neither do I take any responsibility for any damage inflicted to your devices. Use it at your own risk and preferably if you know what you're doing.

The internet has many tutorials about how to connect floppy drives, I suggest that you read/watch one of these as I do only provide this software and no further support for your project.

Have fun!

Kingdread/floppymusic