Floppy Disk-Styled Thumb Drive Shows You Files It Contains

If you're anything like me, you have a dozen USB thumb drives floating around your home and you have no clue what files they contain. Any time you want to find a specific file, you have to plug each thumb drive into your computer, wait for it to mount, then search through the contents. If that drive doesn't have the file you need, you repeat the process with the next one. Wouldn't it be nice if you could see a list of a drive's contents on the device itself? That's what this floppy disk-styled thumb drive provides.

For our younger readers: a floppy disk is an obsolete storage medium that was popular in the '80s and '90s. You may recognize it as the save icon. There were a handful of different types of floppy disks that saw widespread usage over the years, including some that were actually floppy. The most well known was the 3-1/2 inch floppy disk, which was rigid and not floppy. Their standard capacity was 1.44MB, but some could hold as much as 2.8MB. With modern thumb drives featuring capacities measured in terabytes, floppy disks are useless for modern computing. But they still have a lot of charm and many of us find them nostalgic, which is why this thumb drive's design is so appealing.

This thumb drive looks like a very thick floppy disk, with a screen where the label would normally reside. That is a full-color touchscreen that lets the user browse a list of the drive's contents via a nice GUI (graphical user interface). The only downside is that the drive needs power to provide that functionality, which might mean plugging it into a computer's USB port anyway. But you can also power it from a wall wart or a USB power bank.

The only electronic component in this device is an Adafruit PyPortal, which is normally meant to be an "internet display." It includes a SAM D51 microcontroller with an ESP32 co-processor, a 3.2" 320x240 TFT touchscreen, 8MB of onboard flash memory, and a microSD card slot for additional storage. The interface, programmed in CircuitPython, lets you see files in flash memory and anyinserted microSD card.

The real star of the show is, of course, the floppy disk enclosure. That is entirely 3D-printable, and you'll just need a couple of screws to secure the two halves of the shell. It is just a little bit wider and taller than a real floppy disk, but close enough that nobody will notice

The result is the coolest thumb drive we've ever seen.