Combine an old storage medium and the newest audio codec technologies and you get... Something. This thing here.
The goal of this project is to mimic the feeling of having your favorite songs in your hands again. I choosed floppy disks for the availability and price.
For my version of the floppy player i used:
- NEC FD1231H floppy drive (next best one i had)
- A Greaseweazle
- Orange Pi Zero (Cheapes SBC with Armbian)
- Charakter LCD
The audio codec behind this is the MPEG-4 High Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding HE-AAC developed by the Frauenhofer IIS. It reaches good sound quality at low bitrates. ADTS is used as the transport format, as it includes syncronisation, which is important on unreliable mediums such as floppys
High density 3.5" 1.44MB floppy disks are used. With this low storage capacity, an audio stream in sufficient audio quality reaches around 5 minutes of play time. Of course, this is highly subjective and varies from person to person.
At this point, i have to give a hughe thanks to Keirf and his incredible work on the Greaseweazle project. With Greaseweazle, it is possible to rescue floppy disks in all formats flux level data manipulation. The floppy player uses this project to read and write floppy disks without the the burden of a dedicated floppy controller.
Follow the setup instruction on the Greaseweazle project page
In the next revision, a config file will be used for the setup. As long as this does not exist, the following options have to be set.
The LCD Manager provides functions and a backgroung thread for handling a user interface. Open the LcdManager.py and change the settings according to your setup:
| variable | default | usage |
|---|---|---|
| PIN_RESET | 5 | LCD reset pin |
| PIN_RW | 3 | LCD read/write select pin |
| PIN_ENABLE | 7 | LCD enable ping |
| PIN_DATA | [12, 11, 8, 10] | data pins as array (D4, D5, D6, D7) |
| START_STOP_DELAY | 3 | time in seconds at the end and beginning of text scrolling |
| REFRESH_DELAY | 0.5 | time in seconds to shift one character of text |
As the interface is fixed to 2 rows, the LCD settings (LCD_COLUMNS, LCD_ROWS, LCD_DOTSIZE) should not be changed, unless you wish to design your own UI.
This class handles all audio related tasks, such as starting/stopping of audio server, decoder and player. The AudioManager.py file does not provide much flexibilty as for now. Only the audio server can be changed. In the future, audio normalization, bitrates, and more audio device settings will be added
| variable | default | usage |
|---|---|---|
| AUDIO_DEVICE | pulse | audio device used for aplay |
This part handles all drive related tasks such as disk insert detection, motor control and data readout. All functions in here rely heavilly on the Greaseweazle project.
| variable | default | usage |
|---|---|---|
| GREASEWEAZLE_DEVICE | /dev/ttyACM0 | The serial device representing the Greaseweazle |
- Configuration file
- Logging
- Requirements setup
- Audio Manager settings
- Burn script