Floppy Disk MP3 Player

[dubcanada]

Hello,

This sounds like the weirdest possible project I have ever heard of but I am bord and wondering if it is possible.

Basically I want to have a floppy drive output the music off of a floppy. I will have it hook up to a pcb board with all the proper ic and than output the data which will be read off of it too a normal set of headphones or a mono speaker.

I understand floppy's are primitive technology but I really want to challenge myself. I found PJRC and noticed it ran off of IDE Hard Drives. Could I somehow mask a floppy drive and fool the card into thinking the floppy drive was a hard drive (of course I would have to edit the os a bit to fix the reading issue).

Can anyone point me in the right direction or smack me across the face if it is impossible.

- Steve

 

[dknguyen]

You want to make a record player, but instead of records it's a 3.5" floppy drive? I'd smack you, but I am someone who never ever tries to interface to hardware with a "commercialized" protocal (ie. SATA, IDE, native ISB, PCI, PCIExpress). Mainly because you would spend more time trying to hunt down the protocal more than anything else and the fact that such protocals aren't made to be user friendly and seem to be bogged down by legacy a lot of the time.

I think it'd be more useful (and just as challenging, except actually challenging and not "challenging due to the paperwork") to just build a little flash based MP3 player.

You could buy this thing and work on it or reverse engineer it and build another verison yourself from the documentation given since it's all open source:
https://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=8603

 

[dubcanada]

Basically yes. Eventually I want to make it portable but let's start with a stationary floppy disk reader that outputs music stored in sectors on the floppy disk.

- Steve

 

[Nigel Goodwin]

Basically yes. Eventually I want to make it portable but let's start with a stationary floppy disk reader that outputs music stored in sectors on the floppy disk.

Scrap that silly idea - it's a non-starter - floppies are EXTREMELY difficult to interface to, far easier to use an IDE CD-ROM, IDE HDD or an SD card.

 

[Super_voip]

Not to mention the limited capacity of a floppy disk, 1gig USB sticks are selling for $1 at the moment, that's 500 floppies.

 

[pkshima]

More usefull would be to make a device where one can plug in a usb stick and play the music from it. add a FM transmitter to it and we will finally be able to play songs from pendrives in car without upgrading our car stereos.

 

[Hero999]

If it's a cassette play another option would be to get a dummy cassette which plugs into your MP3 player.

 

[wmmullaney]

Not to mention the limited capacity of a floppy disk, 1gig USB sticks are selling for $1 at the moment, that's 500 floppies.

Were are you buying $1 flash drives?!?!?!?!?

 

[Super_voip]

$1 Usb

some of the 'puter shops here are getting rid of the 1gigs as people aren't buying them, even major stores are selling them for $5. 16 & 32 Gig are all the rage now.

 

[Super_voip]

More usefull would be to make a device where one can plug in a usb stick and play the music from it. add a FM transmitter to it and we will finally be able to play songs from pendrives in car without upgrading our car stereos.

I bought just such a device 2 years ago

 

[wmmullaney]

Wow, 1 gigs are $20 here.