Disco-themed floppy disk cleaning machined demoed
RobSmithDev has been posting videos on his floppy disk cleaner for some time, and most recently compiled them and a brief blog post recap into a Hackaday project page, including brief recaps and past YouTube videos detailing the process of building, iterating upon, and exhaustive testing of this floppy disk cleaner. He calls it the “Crazy Disco Disk Cleaning Machine” due to the flashing lights and extravagant color scheme, and it’s being built on the housing of an old speaker with the help of two Arduino control boards.
Seeing as floppy disks have been in circulation since 1971 and a lot of legacy software is still only available on them, it makes sense for someone to pursue the building of an ideal floppy disk cleaning machine, especially if they don’t want to manually clean the disks every time themselves. While usage has obviously declined severely over the past two decades and change, floppies still serve as key pieces of computing history, if nothing else— which is likely why RobSmithDev also made DiskFlashback, which is floppy disk software for Windows.
As excessive as the lighting and editing choices on this demonstration clip are, it’s clear that the final version of this machine was created with great care and efficiency and, most importantly, does its job quite well. After mounting a floppy disk, a mechanical arm moves it to two cleaning pads drip-dosed with isopropyl alcohol immediately before cleaning as the disk rotates inside its enclosure. Then, the disk continues to be rotated as it’s put through a drying cycle, after which the job is done.
Other videos from Rob go into exhaustive detail on the initial building processes and iterations made upon the project since its inception—the first 21-minute video was uploaded a month ago. As of last week, the machine was also tested against molded floppy disks. This mold is ear-invisible to the eye, but floppies can include pads inside meant to prevent dust buildup, so this mold can accumulate and make disks unreadable.
Ultimately, it seems the machine can do the job even in those cases. However, Rob is still considering cleaning solutions besides isopropyl alcohol for future versions of his “Crazy Disco Disk Cleaner”— or at least, for general floppy disk cleaning outside his specific mechanized use case. Either way, the machine’s pretty nifty despite its gaudy design, so the project seems successful.
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