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- 
-
- # Introduction
-
- A few weeks ago I presented my [musical floppy
- drives](https://jrtechs.net/projects/musical-floppy-drive-build-log)
- at the [Rochester Maker Faire](https://rochester.makerfaire.com/) with
- [RITlug](https://ritlug.com/). Wow, that sentence had a ton of
- links-- you should check them out. This post is a quick recap of my
- experience at the Maker Faire and a project update for my musical
- floppy drive project. For those of you who don't know, [Maker
- Faires](https://makerfaire.com/) are community gatherings where people
- "celebrate arts, crafts, engineering, science projects and the
- Do-It-Yourself (DIY) mindset".
-
- I would like to give a huge thanks to
- [Christian](https://ctmartin.me/) for providing me with some of these
- pictures and [RITlug](https://ritlug.com/) for giving me the
- opportunity to present at the Maker Faire.
-
- # Project Background
-
- Musical floppy drives are floppy drives wired to an Arduino to play
- music. I initially started with two floppy drives; however, that grew
- to 8 drives very fast.
-
- <youtube src="Y5msiFa54Ug" />
-
- I currently have 10 floppy drives stacked together in a tower like
- structure to make it easier to take to places like the Maker Faire and
- [Imagine RIT](https://www.rit.edu/imagine/).
-
- 
-
- # Future Project Upgrades
-
- Although the 10 floppy drives are quite loud in a small room, people
- typically found it difficult to hear at the Maker Faire. This was
- largely due to the noisiness of the hundreds of people at the
- convention center. To fix this in the future I want to bring a small
- amplifier for the floppy drives.
-
- The second improvement which I plan on making is creating some form of
- web application where people can request music for the floppy drives
- to play. The potential down side of this is that it is often difficult
- connecting to the internet at conventions.
-
- I have a ton of old IDE hard drives that I plan on incorporating into
- my musical orchestra. The tricky part of that upgrade would be to
- somehow incorporate those into my current floppy drive structure so
- that it is easy to take places. My current plan is to have the hard
- drives completely separate from the floppy drives and run it on its
- own Arduino board.
-
- # Cool Projects at the Maker Faire
-
- Although there were a ton of really cool projects at the Maker Faire,
- I did not have the time explore everything and take a lot of
- pictures. However, I want to share some of the really cool projects
- that I saw at the Maker Faire.
-
- ## HatChan
-
- 
-
- This is a project that one person is calling "HatChan". This is a hat
- equipped with a ton of LED lights, and a fully functioning wireless
- access point. When you connect to his access point, the captcha portal
- takes you to a 4chan esk site where you can upload pictures -- mostly
- memes.
-
- ## 8-bit Computer
-
- 
-
- This one person brought a home made 8-bit computer to the Maker Faire.
- What I find the most impressive about this project was that the person
- who made it was only a sophomore in high school.
-
- ## Foss@Magic
-
- 
- *Photo provided by [Christian](https://ctmartin.me/)*
-
- FOSS@Magic is a organization at RIT which aims to promote free and
- open source software-- i'm also a part of this group. This year the
- FOSS group demoed their colorful MAGIC letters. On a tablet beneath
- the letters, there is a web site open where you can select the color
- of each individual RGB letter.
-
- ## RITlug
-
- 
- *Photo provided by [Christian](https://ctmartin.me/)*
-
- The RIT Linux Users Group (RITlug) is a student-led organization aimed
- to promote and teach students about Linux and open source. This year
- we presented my Floppy Drive project, a Raspberry Pi
- [Lakka](https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/easy-retro-gaming-lakka/)
- gaming set up, a [Magic
- Mirror](https://github.com/MichMich/MagicMirror), and [Tiger
- OS](https://ritlug.com/tigeros).
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