THE many lovely FLOPPY DISK JUKEBOX ever
playing music on floppy drives is something that has been done to death. [kiu]’s RumbleRail is something else entirely. Yes, it’s still a collection of floppy drives playing MIDI files, however the engineering as well as develop high quality that went into this develop puts it in a class by itself.
Instead of the typical assemblage of wires, power cords, as well as circuits that go along with many musical floppy drive builds, [kiu]’s is an exercise in precision as well as modularity. Each of the eight floppy drives are linked to its own chauffeur with an ATMega16 microcontroller on board. The microcontrollers in these chauffeur boards get orders from the command board over an I2C bus. because whatever on the RumbleRail is modular, as well as the truth [kiu] is utilizing DIP switches to set the I2C address of each board, this develop might theoretically be broadened to 127 voices, or 127 private floppy drives each playing their part of a MIDI file.
The RumbleRail can likewise operate in a standalone mode without the requirement for a separate computer feeding it data. MIDI data can be packed off an SD card by the primary controller board, as well as decode them for the floppy drivers.
If you’d like to develop your own RumbleRail, all the board files, schematics, as well as firmware are up on [kiu]’s git. There are, of course, a few videos below of the floppy jukebox in action.