SD-FDD

#31 Sat, 2 Feb 2013 - 06:20

I had started researching this years ago.

One of my goals was to use commodity so that it would be easy for anyone to build. At the time I was looking at using an Ardunino. That never really panned out as it just did not have the horse power.

I've been thinking about the Raspberry PI. It has plenty of power and memory. Using a Linux Kernel patched for realtime it just might work.

#32 Sat, 2 Feb 2013 - 10:41

You can program the R-Pi as a bare-metal board too (ie, no OS, just task-specific code). Pretty hard to beat for ~$30, but if anything it's almost overkill for this kind of application.

#33 Sun, 3 Feb 2013 - 00:37

Thanks to bbraun for the PCBs, I finished assembling two of them today:

I did something pretty awesome -- plugged one of them into the internal floppy port on my IIci's motherboard, and the other into the external floppy connector. They both worked at the same time just fine, booted from one in System 6.0.8 and ran MacPaint from the other. Cool! Awesome job, bigmessowires! Thanks for releasing the design files and everything for this!

#34 Mon, 4 Feb 2013 - 20:31

How much did it cost in total for parts?

#35 Tue, 5 Feb 2013 - 01:16

Hi,

Now if only it could write as well as read...

Anyone willing to tackle that problem?

c

#36 Tue, 5 Feb 2013 - 03:53

How much did it cost in total for parts?

For the parts not counting the PCBs, I spent $54.80 from Digi-Key and $23.54 from SparkFun for parts for two. That's including shipping. Also had to buy two DB-19s from IEC for $2.60 each, plus shipping (bought some other stuff too so not sure what the shipping would actually be). So I'd say the parts come out to around $40 per floppy emu not including the PCBs.

Now if only it could write as well as read...

It already can write. I think you have to make sure you have a fast SD card so it can keep up...