whew! so, turns out it was an underspec’ed power supply. so now we know, 500mA is not enough for a floppy drive you really need 1A. but with that out of the way, we were able to cleanly read all 160 tracks of flux from a floppy disk! this particular disk is one that our friend hid in that place that one time, and we’ve been waiting to be able to see what’s on it… will we be able to extract the sectors and discover what secrets lie within??!? – video (watch until the END!)…

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.