Using the Raspberry Pi to Read Floppy Disks @Raspberry_pi #piday #raspberrypi
Add a floppy drive to your setup! This tutorial from Alan Page of virtualfloppy will show you how to bring that old school look and feel to your computer. Retro is soooo in again.
The Catweasel is an add-on card for the PC which allows reading TRS-80 floppy disks. It works by emulating a floppy disk controller using a combination of hardware and software. At the very start of the current project I believed that similar functionality would be possible by reversing the input and output signals and connecting a TRS-80 floppy drive to the interface board. Just recently I have succeeded in doing this.
The interface board plugs into the top of the Raspberry Pi and the floppy card edge connector plugs into the TRS-80 floppy disk drive. The logic analyzer plug is for testing and development only and is not required for operation.
The interface board sits on top of the Pi during use. It is about the same size as the Raspberry Pi. No PC or Mac is required as this is a complete standalone computer system…
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, or even use Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for MakeCode, CircuitPython, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell with Google Hangouts On-Air is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit, be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Have you tried the new “Adafruit Raspberry Pi Educational Linux Distro” ? It’s our tweaked distribution for teaching electronics using the Raspberry Pi. But wait, there’s more! Try our new Raspberry Pi WebIDE! The easiest way to learn programming on a Raspberry Pi.