HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE! we’re ticking down the new year safe and sound here at home together, with a big mug of cocoa, and a lot of floppy hackin’. tonight we started adding ‘greaseweazle’ support to our arduino floppy library. this will let us use any fast-enough arduino hardware with a fabulous open source flux parsing tool that is written in python. basically, we send the flux pattern for each track over usb serial for it to be parsed or saved on a computer. we have been adding each command throughout the day: enabling the motor, running a bandwidth check, setting drive parameters, etc. we are halfway through the track reading code – we got the read data arriving safely at the computer, but it seems that there is a way to ‘encode’ the index pulse into the flux stream and we have to figure out what polarity and data format its expecting. still, feeling really close! hopefully will be able to dump our first disk image this weekend 🙂 code is here while its being worked on https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_Floppy/blob/main/examples/greaseweazle/greaseweazle.ino

Video.

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…