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​Power issues solution and new system design

A project log for Unconventional Instrument Ochestra

using hardware like floppy drives and 3D printers together to play any MIDI file

laurensweynlaurens.weyn 08/17/2015 at 17:530 Comments

I've finally decided to solve all my power supply problems. Currently, I have seperate power supplies for my 3D printer, my Raspberry Pi, my thermal printer, my various miscellaneous projects and now I need a power supply for my floppy drives. I plan to fix all this with one big old ATX power supply.

It's going to be hooked up to my all purpose Raspberry Pi server, which controls the standby/active state of the power supply with both a physical button and software commands. This power supply will also power my 3D printer, and my floppy and disk drives. I'm sure it won't be a problem, seeing as floppy drives and HDDs are designed to be powered by these things.

I also plan to finally integrate something I've wanted to do for a while now: put the Pi in charge of the orchestra. I'm going to try and make a little server program that my GUI client would connect to, and send over a processed MIDI file for playing, since my Pi is also an Octoprint server. That way, I won't need to keep changing what my 3D printer is plugged into.

I've updated the main page to include a "System Design" reflecting how this would all work. I'll also include it here because those thumbnails are weird:

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