Polish engineer Paweł Zadrożniak has been making music with mechanical computer components for more than a decade. One of his earliest videos involved using a couple of floppy drives to play The Imperial March from Star Wars. The clip was published in 2011 and has amassed more than 6.7 million views to date. Zadrożniak’s latest creation, the Floppotron 3.0, pushes the PC hardware orchestra to new heights.
On average, the rig consumes roughly 300 watts but can peak at around 1,200 watts with everything humming away at the same time. Earlier iterations of the Floppotron were used to cover a variety of songs including Learn to Fly by The Foo Fighters, At Doom’s Gate (the soundtrack to E1M1 from Doom), Blur’s Song 2, Linkin Park’s Numb and tunes from various Mario games. Full technical details are available over on Zadrożniak’s blog should you want to learn more. Found is a TechSpot feature where we share clever, funny or otherwise interesting stuff from around the web.
