The Floppotron: Sweet Dreams

Paweł Zadrożniak · 4.6M views · 2017-10-14 · 2:24

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Overview

The Floppotron plays a cover of Eurythmics' Sweet Dreams using an orchestra of old computer hardware such as floppy drives, hard drives and scanners, driven by microcontrollers. It is a short music performance rather than an explanation.

On Hacker News

HN uses it as the go-to example of music played on obsolete computer hardware, linked whenever floppy drives, odd sounds or machine music come up.

Discussed on HN; no positive recommendation is recorded in this export · HN mentions 2019–2025

Topics

Music performance & songs Embedded systems & DIY electronics Demoscene & retrocomputing

What people said

twic · 2025-02 · Reference
Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) is also a good fit: [VIDEO] There's a good version on Tesla coils too: [LINK] Interestingly, there's no Floppotron version of Bad Apple! - i think that tradition comes from a later era of internet stunt music.
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bitwize · 2023-11 · Reference
> Super cool that the motors can be used for things other than moving the vehicle. It reminds me of how ESCs for RC vehicles use the motors to generate audible chirp tones to indicate status. > Motors are multi-purpose devices! In WALL-E , one of the robots following the title character, lacking any audio output, spins its motors at different rates to play the tune from Hello, Dolly! that it had learned from WALL-E. See also the Floppotron: [VIDEO]
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tehbeard · 2021-12 · Joke / meme
> some weird SCSI card (soundblaster with SCSI, I think) I can't help but imagine it as working similiar to the Floppotron... [VIDEO]
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Sources

Video by Paweł Zadrożniak, played through YouTube.

HN Library · Source license

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