now that we have successful flux reads, its time to get flexible! we’ve swapped our SAMD51 feather board out for an RP2040 feather. not only is this feather a lovely pink shade, but it comes with a totally different chipset. oh no, do we need to start over completely with a new toolchain, timer configuration and dma library? nope! our code is hardware agnostic enough that with pin name tweaks and a couple ifdefs, we can use it just fine with greaseweazle again. so now our library has 2 chips it can use, very handy when there’s a silicon shortage going round. next up, could we use the $4 raspberry pi pico board??? stay tuned 🙂 – video.
YAY! floppy disk interfacing part 7, a floppy flux milestone!
reading floppy disk data part 6, MFM sector decoding
reading raw floppy disk data part 5, at night the greaseweazles come
interfacing with floppy disks at low level, part 4
Reading floppy disk data, part 3! itsa pulse party
Adding floppy disk support to CircuitPython, step 2
Adding floppy disk support to CircuitPython, step 1…
Adafruit Floppy is a project to make a flexible, full-stack, open source hardware/software device for reading, archiving, accessing and duplicating floppy disk media. It joins a family of open source hardware and software such as greaseweazle and fluxengine, and will attempt to increase the availability and accessibility of floppy disk controllers by: porting the greaseweazle / fluxengine firmware to Arduino so that it is less tied to specific hardware, adding firmware support for the RP2040 chip / low cost pico, adding hardware support for reading apple ii disks including index sensing, adding woz/a2r support to greaseweazle / fluxengine, and investigating analog flux data acquisition methods for repair of damaged disks. all of this with permissively licensed hardware and software so folks can re-create without licensing agreements, NDAs, or discussion.
Oh, this is really amazing and very fundamental work. You seem to have great knowledge and tools available. Please keep it up. I would love to see a way to be able to interface with these floppy drives directly from a Raspberry Pi or Arduino without all the extra hardware or translation required in between. Is the wiring the same for all these floppy drives? You’re now making an image it seems but will we be able to mount, read, write directly to floppies with your library? What about the rotation speeds? Will you share a wiring scheme or tutorial with us? Again, thanks a lot!