There's nothing fairly just like the drive to construct one thing simply to see in the event you can. YouTuber polymatt got down to create a floppy disk drive, the favored storage medium of yesteryear, from scratch, as a result of why not. For anybody born too late to have often used one, a floppy disk is a magnetically coated, versatile polyester disk encased in a protecting shell. Insert it right into a floppy drive, and a magnetic head reads or writes knowledge on the disk. If you happen to've ever questioned why the "save" icon appears the way in which it does, it's based mostly on the form of a floppy disk.
To start out, polymatt measured and recreated the disk enclosure and different items in Shapr3D and MakeraCAM, then minimize the aluminum items on a Carvera Air CNC machine. The magnetic disk itself was made by laser-cutting a chunk of PET movie and coating it with a suspension of iron oxide powder. After assembling all of the parts and some touch-and-go moments, he was truly in a position to magnetize the floppy disk and write to it, albeit at a really primary stage.
We declared the floppy disk useless in 2010, and within the years since then even people who clung on the longest have deserted it. The Japanese authorities lastly mentioned goodbye to the floppy disk in 2024, and the German Navy moved on from the format in the identical yr. The US authorities solely simply stopped utilizing 8-inch floppy disks to coordinate the launch of nukes in 2019.
Polymatt's venture was a beautiful dive into nostalgic tech and engineering prowess. Perhaps subsequent time he could make a compact disc from scratch.
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