this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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Yeah, I want to make use of an IDE floppy drive, which will need to use a SATA adaptor to hook up to the server. I'll probably be using a Debian-based container, and I'll need to automatically read the contents of the disk in some way.

I'm kinda assuming this is actually viable, and that I can work along the basic process of using an off-the-shelf IDE-SATA adapter, give it a mount point in the system, then monitor that directory.

I'm still fairly new to Linux, so I'm not aware of all the quirks and astrices that often come up, especially when wanting to do something like this in 2023.

For the curious, I'm building a centralised music system that will serve multiple speakers, including RF. I'll be managing the music and play lists via whichever modern music server seems the most appropriate, but I thought it would be really neat to use floppy disks as a physical way of selecting playlist, but not exclusively.

All the disks would contain are small ID tokens that represent the playlist on the digital system. The software will monitor the drive, and when a new token is identified, it will simply trigger the playlist to start, presumably via an API call.

Completely pointless, but I like tactile shit and the nostalgia factor!

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

No idea how to do this properly, but it's definitely possible. Maybe a USB to IDE adapter makes more sense than going through SATA as it can just expose the floppy drive as a USB stick.

But then again CD drives have been around for ages as well and work properly on linux, so do your research.

The steps will probably look like this:

  • Autodetect when a floppy is inserted
  • mount it (possibly combined with the first step)
  • automatically run a script after mounting
  • writing the script, which will read the contents of the drive and control your player (chatGPT should be able to do that for you with a bit of trial&error)