Floppy8 Manages to Fit an Entire Computer Inside a Floppy Drive

Why build a tiny media player?

For Abraham Haskins, browsing eBay for weird/intriguing parts and components is a way to relax and hopefully find something compelling for a project. One night, he stumbled upon, in his words, a "mysterious eBay floppy drive ... with a [wonderful] texture on the front cover, smooth shiny beige metal on the outside, and a playful and complex rainbow ribbon cable." Due to his love of physical media and compulsion to purchase this retro floppy drive, he decided to buy it and create something new.

Once the drive was in his hands, he came to the conclusion that the best approach would be to gut the innards and replace it with modern electronics in hopes of having a usable device for years to come. Ultimately, his idea was to turn the drive into a media player and miniature retro games emulator console, similar to RetroPi-powered designs.

The cartridge system

Before work could begin on the internals, Haskins had to figure out the best way to get external game/media data loaded onto the system via removable media. The initial iteration consisted of a faithfully recreated 3.5" floppy disk PCB that routes the signals from a microSD card underneath to a series of exposed pins on one edge. However, the sharp edges could damage the drive's front and the glossy soldermask meant printed images wouldn't stick to the surface. Instead, far simpler 3D-printed cartridges were fabricated that essentially embed a microSD card onto one edge so it can plug into a socket within the drive, thus solving both problems.

Finding a suitable computer

With the physical media issue now solved, Haskins now had to move onto the next step of actually placing a computer inside of the drive. Because it had to play 4K video and newer retro games with decent quality, a raspberry Pi was out of the question owing to its weak CPU. He ended up purchasing a Latte Panda 3 Delta, which not only contains an 11th-gen Intel CPU and 8GB of DDR4 RAM, but also has a built-in Wi-Fi 6 module and even an ATmega32U4 microcontroller soldered directly to the board.

Custom parts and assembly

A front status RGB LED was easily attached behind the drive's existing status indicator and then wired to three of the Latte Panda's PWM pins. In order to eject cartridges, a servo motor was connected to the GPIO header and made to rotate via an Arduino sketch when the drive's eject button is pressed.

Once wired together, Haskins designed a series of brackets and plates that would hold all of the internal components in the correct location. After several iterations and attaching a few standoffs for added rigidity, he was finally able to mount everything inside of the floppy drive and get it powered on.

Using the Floppy8

The controllers Haskins went with were a pair cloned NES controllers that retain the original button layout while also having Bluetooth connectivity. A couple modifications were made to them, including the addition of weights for a higher quality feel and reducing light bleed from the power LED via heat shrink tubing. Once completed, the affectionately named Floppy8 game/media system was able to load cartridges, play retro games via emulation, and eject them thanks to the added servo motor — all inside of an Amiga 1010 floppy reader. More information about Haskins's project can be found here in his blog post.