Floppy reading at flux level, WAS: Re: Tips for making Twiggy images

From: Natalia Portillo <claunia_at_email.domain.hidden>
Date: Mon, 16 Feb 2015 19:17:23 +0000

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Hi Simon,

I'm a programmer, I need an electronics.

I'm quite sure that any ARM with analogue inputs can be easily converted in something better than Kryoflux.

The TI LaunchPad is an ARM microcontroller at 120Mhz with a whole lot of analogue inputs, a quite big flash for firmware (1Mb) and a big enough RAM to store tracks (256Kbyte).

It also comes with a pretty simple to code real-time OS and USB library, so storing fluxes via a host computer should be easy to do. Even it can be enhanced to store them directly on SD cards with a little more hardware.

And it costs $12.99.

My problem is, connecting the floppy drive bus to the LaunchPad inputs. I don't know if I need resistors, buffer, voltage level converters, etc. And even with all the needed discrete hardware, cost will be by my calculations, be far lower than Kryoflux, and easily instructable in a DIY manual.

But as I said, I'm just a programmer, I need an electronics pal to give me the BOM and diagrams to make it do magic.

Anyone here up to the challenge?

Regards,
Natalia Portillo

El 16/2/15 a las 19:07, Simon Claessen escribió:
> well, time is not on my side. I'll rather grab this than wait for
> someone to write something. It could be that using a logic analizer
> (like the DSlogic) with a simple arduino can do the trick, like
> sigrok with an extension or something, but i'm not a programmer.
> :-(
>
> simon
>
> On 16-02-15 19:58, Natalia Portillo wrote: Hi Simon,
>
> El 16/2/15 a las 18:32, Simon Claessen escribió:

>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>>>> But you should think about one thing, that is, how much
>>>>>> can you read talking to the floppy controller, and how
>>>>>> much it is really stored in the disk. We'll need
>>>>>> something like DiscFerret to really know.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Really why haven't someone yet taken a cheap ARM
>>>>>> Msomething and made one that works in a simple
>>>>>> development board, like, say, TI LaunchPad I don't know.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> well, at the moment I am playing with a kryoflux board with
>>>> the

>
> Philosophically I'm against Kryoflux, being closed source and by a
> team with too much of an ego is against the very definition of
> museum.
>
> And in my museum I have a quite huge collection of floppies
> waiting for a better solution.
>

>>>> intention to grab all the floppie in out collection of the 
>>>> computermuseum at hack42.nl that being 2,5", 3", 3.5" 5.25"
>>>> 8" in all kind of flavours. the Kryoflux works on the lowest
>>>> level a drive can generate as long as it can direct the heads
>>>> though the pinout on the drive, but a simple addon circuit to
>>>> twiggy drives should be possible. decoding the flux
>>>> transitions is another thing though...

>
> Decoding GCR should be quite easy. The sony GCR format is well
> documented afaik. Making the kryoflux work with the non-shugart
> bus, that's another thing, as its firmware is closed source you
> depend on them for that.
>
> If you can get to solder SMD and CPUs on boards, I suggest you
> DiscFerret. While Phil is not selling it anymore, it is wholly
> opensource, so anyone with the equipment (sadly I don't have) can
> build one by itself and enhance the firmware to talk to new buses.
> Also, it's more capable than KryoFlux, having been used to
> succesfully read MFM and RLL hard disks over a ST506 bus.
>
> http://discferret.com/wiki/DiscFerret
>
> I would love to get my hands on one of those.
>
> Regards, Natalia Portillo
>
>>
>

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Received on 2015-02-16 14:31:47