Before SSDs or USB keys or email attachments or SD cards or even CD-ROMs, there was the mighty floppy disk! These lil guys could store about a megabyte or so of files in their cool square shapes, using a magnetic circle that could be encoded to read or write your files as it spun. Wild, right? Well you might still have some diskettes around that need accessing, and you can’t just press them to your forehead and decode the files by crainial-magnet-osmosis. Instead you will need a 3.5″ Floppy Drive like this one!
Please Note: Floppy drives are not manufactured anymore which means any and all drives you find are leftovers from the 80’s and 90’s. And much like people from that time period, they have a few tattoos, scars and stories to tell. So these drives may have scratches, stickers, dents and chips. Models may vary but these tend to be Sony MPF-920 models. They are all tested to work reading a FAT12 formatted diskette.
Each drive can be plugged into a 34-pin IDC data cable and “Berg” 4-pin power cable. Even though the power cables have 12V, only 5V at approximately 2 Amps is required. You will need a controller on the other side, like a PC motherboard or a Floppy FeatherWing. These are non-trivial to use on their own, they definitely don’t have USB connection, so please make sure you know what you’re getting into if you pick one up! No diskettes are included.
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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, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, 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.
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