There isn’t a doubt that floppy disks have been gamechangers within the early house laptop revolution, however they’re additionally notoriously unreliable and fickle. Not solely are they susceptible to information corruption, however they’re vulnerable to bodily harm and fouling. No person desires to place nasty, soiled disks into their prized classic floppy drives to gunk up the works, so cleansing is a should in case you have dirty disks with information you need to retrieve. To assist his fellow Amiga fanatics clear their disks on the Nottingham, UK’s Kickstart occasion again in June, Rob Smith constructed this wacky machine.
This can be a absolutely computerized floppy disk-cleaning contraption. Pop in a dirty 3.5 and it’ll do the remainder. It should even present a little bit of leisure in the course of the wash cycle. It operates by bodily touching spinning brushes (coated in isopropyl alcohol) to the uncovered magnetic disk, transferring them throughout the radius whereas the disk spins. After cleansing, the machine then blows heat air over the disk to shortly dry the alcohol.
All of these operations occur underneath the steerage of a knockoff “Arduino Mini Nano V3.0” microcontroller growth board. It controls all six of the motion motors, plus the alcohol pump motor, dryer fan blower motors, LED lighting, and sound results.
There are a variety of motion motors as a result of there may be a variety of motion. The 2 brushes rotate on small geared DC motors and pivot out of the best way on servo motors. A stepper motor strikes the disk right into a place and one other small stepper motor rotates the disk. The Arduino additionally controls energy to the heating parts by relays. Apart from some rails, bearings, and fasteners, a lot of the machine’s components have been designed in TinkerCAD after which 3D printed.
Smith livened up the washing expertise with some WS2812b LED strip animations, music, and sound results. The audio performs from a DFRobot DFPlayer Mini MP3 participant module, with the recordsdata saved on an SD card. It pumps sound out to a pair of audio system utilizing its built-in amplifier.
As a result of Smith is a category act, he determined to check his machine as objectively as potential to judge its efficacy. He gathered a complete pile of sullied disks and divided them into 4 teams: hand-cleaned with alcohol, machine-cleaned with alcohol, hand-cleaned with dish detergent, and machine-cleaned with dish detergent. He then examined the disks’ sectors earlier than and after cleansing.
Whereas the pattern dimension was too small to come back to any definitive conclusions, Smith discovered that the machine was virtually nearly as good as cleansing by hand—no less than inside an affordable margin of error. So far as we’re involved, the machine is successful.