If you are done with university and are looking for a new use for your TI-83+ Calculator then look no further than this project. The guys over at Cemetech are Playing Floppy Drive Music using a TI-83+ Calculator. To make your own you will need to download mobileTunes and build the small circuit.
“Inspired by other projects such as the Star Wars Imperial March played on two floppy drives and Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, BWV 565 on four floppy drives, I hoped to implement this concept on a much more limited control device: a TI-83+ graphing calculator. While microcontrollers such as those used in the projects above have dozens of GPIO pins for interfacing with external hardware, the TI-83+ graphing calculator has only two I/O lines, both bidirectional. I did a bit of research on controlling floppy drives, and discovered that if I held pin 16 (Motor Enable) and pin 12 (Drive Select) of the floppy drive low, I need only pulse the Direction In and Step pins (18 and 20) to control the floppy drive’s read/write head stepper motor.“