DataStorm V1.0, a Full-Auto Floppy Disk Cannon

Bob Loblaw writes "I ran across a huge stash of floppies at our office, and after some discussion, it became clear that rather than throw them away, we should build a gun that fires floppies. I had just bought a welder so this was a challenging first project. After about a month of work in my garage at night the DataStorm was born. It was constructed of scrap metal, a kid's bike, a weed-eater motor, and an electric screwdriver. The most difficult task ended up being how to add spin to the disk without significantly reducing its velocity. After a week and a half of trying different options, a stack of zip ties was found to work best. Since we had so much time in it we elected to shoot an infomercial showcasing the device, and had to learn to shoot & edit video as we went. It was basically an office joke that spiraled out of control. My wife is not amused. At all. I hope you like it."

Comments

Re:I was just wondering

[TubeSteak]

Seriously, does anyone know of a website with plans for a gun like this that shoots tennis balls? My pit bull is waiting tirelessly for a machine to play fetch with. It seems the basic parts are similar here. Homemade: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PcL6-mjRNk
Retail: http://www.buygodoggo.com/

Skip to the good bit

[Thornae]

If you're going to watch the video, let it load, then skip to about 3 minutes in, then stop watching once you've seen the machine do its thing.

The rest is padding.

Re:Good, bad, and ugly

[Bert64]

We did this on the Amiga years ago, but with only 4 drives...
The floppy controller was fully DMA, so it worked quite wel with all 4 drives spinning at once, the built in floppy controller on most x86 machines is garbage but i guess the USB ones should be a bit better.

Re:Good, bad, and ugly

[An Ominous Cow Erred]

Well, that's not quite true. The Amiga's floppy bus did indeed support 4 devices (as opposed to 2 on the typical IBM/Intel controller), and it was DMA (as opposed to Intel PIO). In fact, it used the same DMA controller as the audio system. =) ...but it was only capable of transferring to/from one drive at a time. Traffic destined for other drives would be scheduled in a round-robin fashion. So running 4 drives at once wouldn't give you 4X speed -- just 4X capacity.

Re:Good, bad, and ugly

[drinkypoo]

So running 4 drives at once wouldn't give you 4X speed -- just 4X capacity.

While this is true (the Amiga's floppy controller is not all that different in capability from a PC floppy controller, which can also handle 4 drives if you cable it correctly - it's just tied in with DMA on the Amiga) you can probably get one quarter the seek time in cases where the floppies are fragmented :)

Re:Great

[Silicon Avatar]

Many FedLine terminals (what banks use to "key" in the Wire Transfer information) only allow floppies, for some obscure security reason.

Re:Great

[petermgreen]

I know at uni there are lots of old PCs controlling various bits of equipment. Often theese machines are running very old operating systems so USB mass storage is not an option (MS really only got USB mass storage right with ME/2K , with 98 you could use them but only with a manufacturer specific driver or some third party kludge, with 95 or NT4 you don't have much chance).