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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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