This Wacky Machine Automatically Cleans Floppy Disks
There is no doubt that floppy disks were gamechangers in the early home computer revolution, but they’re also notoriously unreliable and fickle. Not only are they prone to data corruption, but they are susceptible to physical damage and fouling. Nobody wants to put nasty, dirty disks into their prized vintage floppy drives to gunk up the works, so cleaning is a must if you have grimy disks with data you want to retrieve. To help his fellow Amiga enthusiasts clean their disks at the Nottingham, UK’s Kickstart event back in June, Rob Smith built this wacky machine.
This is a fully automatic floppy disk-cleaning contraption. Pop in a filthy 3.5 and it will do the rest. It will even provide a bit of entertainment during the wash cycle. It operates by physically touching spinning brushes (coated in isopropyl alcohol) to the exposed magnetic disk, moving them across the radius while the disk spins. After cleaning, the machine then blows warm air over the disk to quickly dry the alcohol.
All of those operations happen under the guidance of a knockoff “Arduino Mini Nano V3.0” microcontroller development board. It controls all six of the movement motors, plus the alcohol pump motor, dryer fan blower motors, LED lighting, and sound effects.
