Pawł Zadrożniak and His Floppotron 3.0: A New Generation of Hardware Orchestra

Retired hardware does not end up in silicon heaven, but in Pawł Zadrożniak’s workshop. This Polish music and computer enthusiast combined both passions and created his own hardware orchestra called Floppotron.

He already has his third generation, which he assembled from 512 floppy drives, 16 disks and 4 desktop scanners. Even those numbers must be nicely rounded to two. The whole thing is controlled by one computer, which precisely moves the motors so that they emit the desired sound.

He is dedicated to the construction of the Floppotron a whole long blog post, where he mentions how he had to create his own firmware for the controllers and how he coped with high consumption (the power consumption is up to 1.2 kW at peak times). His instrument is even compatible with the MIDI interface, so music can be composed for them in all common programs.

When he introduced Floppotron 3.0 to the world, he demonstrated its capabilities on the composition Vjezd gladiatorů by the Czech composer Julio Fučík. But he also showed modern music on his YouTube channel.

Queen – I Want to Break Free

You can support Zadrożniak on Patreon, where it offers subscribers recorded music in MP3 format as well. By the way, his unusual instrument is not the only one. The channel is also very popular Device Orchestra, which made not only computer hardware sing, but also cash register printers and toothbrushes. And you can also compare its variant The Final Countdown. Alternatively, he played the Imperial March from Star Wars on a toaster or an epilator.