You should have senn this..

On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 6:43 PM, Holm Tiffe <holm at freibergnet.de> wrote: After seeing this make the rounds a few times, I grabbed the software the other day and got it going with one drive. It's a Java MIDI parser that sends commands down a (USB-implemented) serial port to an embedded app on the Arduino to send appropriately timed step and direction signals to up to 8 (on an Arduino Uno) devices. 3.5" floppy drives are unloved enough and available in such quantities that it's a cheap way to create an array of mechanical sounders. There are plenty of options for building alternate sounders but unless you happen to have a pile of stepper drivers on hand, the costs could mount up quickly. The software is here: https://github.com/SammyIAm/Moppy It took me a bit of fiddling to get the Java app to compile on an Ubuntu box. I didn't want to mess with NetBeans; I just wanted a .jar file. I had to find a framework jar and, of course, there was some fiddling with librxtxSerial.so and RXTXcomm.jar, but I did get it working. It reminded me why I'm very very happy not to be making a living working with Java. I'm considering scaling up to the full 8 drives. Right now I'm scavenging locally for connectors and drives and such. Turns out of all the junk I have lying around, a stack of generic floppy drives is _not_ part of it (I do have spare non-mainstream drives like Teac FD55GFRs and Amiga "720K" drives and oddball Sony drives for the Tandy 1000, etc, but not a pile of FD235HDs, for example). I think there's also some MIDI editing going on since most of the MIDI files assume a certain acoustic response from the synthesizer end. Certainly some files play "cleaner" than others. -ethan