Posts for the month of January 2011

3.5" Floppy-disk Archiving Machine

August 31st of last year, at the age of 89, my Grandfather passed away. I'm a computer geek, as was he, though his machines filled rooms, and mine, merely pockets. His software flew fighter aircraft. He worked on the Apollo missions. He wrote the first software by which to operate a nuclear reactor. That is a hard act to follow.

But as a computer geek, he had accumulated a large stack of 3.5" floppy disks: 443, of them in fact. And when he passed away, it became my responsibility to deal with those. I was not looking forward to the days of mindless repetition inherent in that task. So, I did what any self-respecting software engineer would do: I automated it.

Start with Lego Mindstorms, add a laptop running Fedora Linux, an Android Dev Phone 1, a good bit of Python code, and about the same number of hours of work, and you get this:

picture of floppy archiving machine

Watch it in action on YouTube

There are a number of interesting details in this build which I plan to write about in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

Follow up articles: NXT control software, The Floppy-Disk Archiving Machine, Mark II