This Wacky Machine Automatically Cleans Floppy Disks

There is no doubt that floppy disks were gamechangers in the early home computer revolution, but they’re also notoriously unreliable and fickle. Not only are they prone to data corruption, but they are susceptible to physical damage and fouling. Nobody wants to put nasty, dirty disks into their prized vintage floppy drives to gunk up the works, so cleaning is a must if you have grimy disks with data you want to retrieve. To help his fellow Amiga enthusiasts clean their disks at the Nottingham, UK’s Kickstart event back in June, Rob Smith built this wacky machine.

This is a fully automatic floppy disk-cleaning contraption. Pop in a filthy 3.5 and it will do the rest. It will even provide a bit of entertainment during the wash cycle. It operates by physically touching spinning brushes (coated in isopropyl alcohol) to the exposed magnetic disk, moving them across the radius while the disk spins. After cleaning, the machine then blows warm air over the disk to quickly dry the alcohol.

All of those operations happen under the guidance of a knockoff “Arduino Mini Nano V3.0” microcontroller development board. It controls all six of the movement motors, plus the alcohol pump motor, dryer fan blower motors, LED lighting, and sound effects.

There are a lot of movement motors because there is a lot of movement. The two brushes rotate on small geared DC motors and pivot out of the way on servo motors. A stepper motor moves the disk into a position and another small stepper motor rotates the disk. The Arduino also controls power to the heating elements through relays. Other than some rails, bearings, and fasteners, most of the machine’s parts were designed in TinkerCAD and then 3D printed.

Smith livened up the washing experience with some WS2812b LED strip animations, music, and sound effects. The audio plays from a DFRobot DFPlayer Mini MP3 player module, with the files stored on an SD card. It pumps sound out to a pair of speakers using its built-in amplifier.

Because Smith is a class act, he decided to test his machine as objectively as possible to evaluate its efficacy. He gathered a whole pile of sullied disks and divided them into four groups: hand-cleaned with alcohol, machine-cleaned with alcohol, hand-cleaned with dish detergent, and machine-cleaned with dish detergent. He then tested the disks’ sectors before and after cleaning.

While the sample size was too small to come to any definitive conclusions, Smith found that the machine was almost as good as cleaning by hand—at least within a reasonable margin of error. As far as we’re concerned, the machine is a success.