It could appear like a 3D-printed save icon, however 3.5-inch disks had been the usual laptop media format again within the late 1900s. USB flash drives have lengthy since changed them, however that did not cease Oleg Kutkov from plugging a 3.5-inch disk drive into his Tesla, simply to see what would occur. In keeping with his publish on X, the previous tech nonetheless works, even in his trendy car.
Tom’s {Hardware} elaborates additional. The one particular {hardware} required was a converter between the drive’s FDD output and a USB. Whereas that port is helpful for hacking a Tesla, no software program modification was required to learn and play an MP3 music file off the disk (“By no means Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley, in fact). The drive whirs and chatters because it reads the info, and the music does skip a bit, however it works.
“It is good that the Linux kernel nonetheless helps this subsystem,” Kutkov wrote. “The system script mounts any detected disk drive (with some exceptions) as exterior storage for Sentry/Dashcam/media supply. It is even doable to play a single MP3 file from the diskette.” The converter additionally deserves a little bit of credit score, as he writes in a reply to a remark. “USB controller emulates TEAC USB UF000x – a generic USB floppy (Uniform Floppy Interface) that the Linux kernel helps.”
No sensible use
Sadly, this doesn’t suggest we will mud off our previous disks and play Wolfenstein 3D on a Tesla’s display. Whereas it acknowledges the drive, that will not allow you to hack its Linux-based working system to put in Lotus 1-2-3. Whereas it’s doable to hack a Tesla, you may want one thing a bit extra superior to do it.
The largest limitation, nevertheless, is what doomed the three.5-inch floppy to obsolescence within the first place: its restricted storage. Whereas 1.44 megabytes was big at a time when Invoice Gates is falsely quoted as saying “640k must be sufficient for anyone,” it is virtually nothing by at present’s requirements. I went searching for the “By no means Gonna Give You Up” MP3 file and located it to be 9.1 MB, which might require seven disks to play the entire music. I believed six disks to put in Home windows 3.1 was loads again within the day, however that complete working system was smaller than a fundamental Rick Roll. Kutkov could have decreased the audio high quality or trimmed the music all the way down to only the start to play it in his video and make his level.
Kutkov did attempt to format the floppy disk to be used with Tesla’s Sentry characteristic, however it did not work. That is no large loss, because the disk would not have the ability to maintain greater than a second’s price of video anyway. To place this limitation into perspective with a contemporary instance, Baldur’s Gate 3 takes up 140.7 gigabytes of reminiscence on my Xbox. One GB incorporates 1,024 MB. It might take roughly 100,000 3.5-inch floppies to retailer the sport. Solely the ill-fated Tesla Semi might transport that many disks.
