Darth Vader Enters Stage Left — Cue the A: Drives!

Just when you thought 3.5 floppies were utterly useless, in comes Polish Super Genius Paweł (SileNT on his website), who programmed two old floppy drives to play The Imperial March from Star Wars.

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Paweł tells us how it works:

It’s nothing new and it’s very simple. The sound comes from a magnetic head moved by stepper motor. To make a specific sound, head must be moved with appropriate frequency.

FDD has a simple interface – the description may be found for example [HERE]. To move the head you need to activate the drive by pulling the DRVSB0 or 1 (depends on the cable you have and the connector – notice the crossover on the FDD ribbon cable) pin low and then falling edge on STEP pin makes the head move one step in direction dependent on DIR pin state.

An ATMega microcontroller is generating those frequencies and it makes the drives play music.

That’s all gibberish to me, but who cares? It’s freaking awesome. (And I’m not even a Star Wars fan!)

Special bonus video: Watch what happens when a four-year-old boy learns Darth Vader’s secret for the first time.

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So adorable. As YouTuber QualityJeverage said, “In thirty seconds, we see a boy become a nerd. Beautiful.”