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The interpreted language CircuitPython runs a wide range of 32-bit microcontrollers. It already provides help for storage units like SD playing cards. Adafruit plans to take a proverbial step again, to maneuver that storage functionality farther by including floppy disk help into CircuitPython!
Whereas we have a tendency to consider information as bits and bytes, that isn’t the way it will get encoded on a magnetic medium, like a floppy disk. Or not less than, in a roundabout way. A drive controller encodes information into symbols to forestall conditions like a byte that’s all zeros or all ones. The write head information these symbols onto a spinning disk as magnetic flux transitions.
Girl Ada has been working to grasp how floppy drives work to start the event of CircuitPython drivers. Step one on this course of is interfacing with the disk drive, adopted by a couple of low-level duties like transferring the servo head and studying the observe indicator. Subsequent is studying these flux transitions and deciphering them.
This functionality has been round for some time. For instance, the open-source undertaking Greaseweazle is an adapter board that matches onto the STM32 “Blue Capsule” type issue. It acts as a USB-to-floppy disk drive adapter. It reads the flux transitions after which depends on PC-based software program to decode these into bytes. At present, the undertaking helps codecs for computer systems such because the Commodore 64, Atari ST, IBM PC, and extra.
Tasks like these are very application-specific. They intend to archive 5.25 inch and three.5-inch floppies. Adafruit’s work is a bit bit totally different. Adafruit plans so as to add help immediately into CircuitPython, which might imply immediately studying and writing information to/from a 3.5-inch floppy drive in a microcontroller program!
Adafruit Floppy Flooper PCB (📷: Adafruit)
One of many outcomes from their work is a “Flooper” PCB that adapter both normal 34-pin IDC or 26-pin FPC floppy drives. [Note: In several places, Adafruit refers to this as a “flippy-floppy” adapter. The use of “flippy” here is not related to “flippy disks,” which were the nickname given to 5.25-inch single-sided disks that users flipped to utilize both sides of the media.]
At present, this undertaking is a piece in progress. The conversion from Arduino prototype to CircuitPython has not occurred but. Nevertheless, there’s a number of in-process studying occurring. If you need to grasp how 3.5-inch floppy drives work, comply with together with Girl Ada’s progress on the Adafruit Weblog or YouTube channel.
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