floppotron

HDD head controller (almost) ready.

Added 2021-11-30 17:27:27 +0000 UTC

In the last days, I have been working on a controller for hard disk heads. The previous one has some problems and I had to redesign the circuit board and have it manufactured. Global chip shortage also caused some complications here, but I could finally assemble a couple of new boards.

I have also added a feature which was not planned for the initial machine - lights on every instrument. When there is more than 2 scanners making noise at the same time, sometimes it's hard to know what's actually going on. The visuals are also important for the end result, so there will be a RGB light strip on every scanner and RGB led on every hard disk. The lights blink when the "instrument" is playing.

Here is a small demo of the final effect. The initial version will have around 16 +/-4 hard disks, depending on what I will find in my resources. I am currently in a process of selecting the drives - despite that they are all the same devices, the mechanics are different in each model and they sound different.

Before completion, I still have one circuit board design to finish, some software fixes to do and probably some visuals for the computer screen - I am thinking about putting a screen with something like in current videos - a old-style terminal application which will show the device status with blinking controls and data coming in and out.