The novelty of a good Raspberry Pi project is hard to wear off. When makers get to work with rose-tinted glasses, the end result is often a delicious medley of retro technology and modern finesse—like this incredible Raspberry Pi floppy player project known as the LimaTek Diskmaster, created by a Reddit user known as GreedyPaint.
The project is designed to play full-length movies off a floppy disk with terrible quality using a custom Raspberry Pi-based platform and x265 codec.
You read that right, the floppy used in this project is storing an entire movie on a single disk. The quality is beyond subpar after going through all the compression needed to reach its final size of 1.37MB. The end result is a full-length demo of Shrek with a 120 x 96 resolution and a whoppin' FPS of 4.
According to GreedyPaint, floppy detection was tricky with Linux and involved a bit of custom coding to pull off. The Pi continuously checks to see if a floppy has been inserted by searching for a /dev/sda path. If it finds the path and there is data inside, it knows the floppy is connected. If none is there, it deletes the /dev/sda path and determines no floppy is connected before checking again.
When the machine boots, the user is welcomed with a beautiful custom animation that hearkens back to VHS company logos of the past. The user is prompted to insert a floppy disk after which a movie will begin playing once the disk is detected.
To read more about this awesome project and see it in action, visit the official thread on Reddit. Be sure to check out our list of Best Raspberry Pi Projects for more cool creations from the maker community.
