time to wrap up today’s hacking! we had a goal of finishing today with a raspberry pi pico board being able to read out flux off a floppy disk, and here we are: this is a ultra-low cost dev board, only $4 and 15K in stock at Digi-Key https://www.digikey.com/short/f2d841fn – a little soldering is required to attach header but the wiring is straight forward: start at GP2 and connect all the pins thru to GP14 in a row, skipping over the ground pads (dont forget to connect one of the grounds of course) we just tested dumping our 1.44 HD diskette just fine. in the next week we’ll try to add flux writing support (we’ve only done reading so far), trying out HFS DD (so we can image @anildash‘s prince floppy), completing a PR to greaseweazle and maybe trying out the disk ii connection. a great way to kick off 2022, happy new year! – video.

Cross-platform interfacing hardware for floppy disks, part 8 – PINK TIME!

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.