Raspberry Pi Floppy Controller Board | Hacker News Reader

Raspberry Pi Floppy Controller Board

smbaker.com

117 pointszdw36 comments

I see great potential for a Raspberry Pi based online radio player, where the playlist is transferred using a text file on a 3.5" floppy disk.

That would mean that you could choose your radio station (or Spotify playlist) by picking out the appropriate floppy disk and shoving it into the radio.

It just feels better than tapping on a button on a touchscreen...

For your idea, you could do what a lot of kids toys do, where they have a "cartridge" (puzzle piece, alphabet letter, whatever) which has some notches, so it pushes a combo of switches to select what sound to play

Could also do it with barcodes

i did this with toggle switches in my car, and they're binary, so the 4 gave me 16 options... per mode, i had a mode button too, in radio mode it was either podcasts, a few SDR options, and a few mp3 music genres

then i decided the toggle switches were gonna get embedded in my face if i got in a wreck so i took them out ... there's a reason all the buttons in cars are round and plastic, I guess.

We would be friends. Any pics?

Now I want to build a floppy drive into my car, and each 3.5" disk would be an "album" - of course it would just be a cartridge that the system would recognize to play a particular set of files which are stored internally.

It would amuse my friends on car trips, not that I have any of those...

I planned to do that with old 64 MiB or 128 MiB SD cards and a car radio with SD support: One SD card = one album.

However, nobody still makes SD cards this small, and using a 16 GiB card for 1 album seems wasteful :)

But floppy disks would be much nicer.

Try aliexpress you can bulk buy 4gb ones for about a dollar each.

I see a problem tho, the floppy don't go nicely with the car enviroment and they will probably become unreadable pretty fast.

I had a similar idea but i wanted to embed small nfc tag into some floppy disk and use a broken floppy reader that i own with a tag reader inside the gut of the reader reusing only the eject mechanism and the led, (i will be missing the nice motor noise tough...).

I'm also experimenting with other cartridge-style meccanism

Echoes of FlashPath (have one somewhere):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlashPath

It is an adapter that takes flash cards (e.g. SmartMedia) and can be used in 3.5" drives.

USB sticks?

NFC tags too

My Covid-project has actually been building exactly this -- except with QR-codes on cards and a dedicated reader. Still in mockup stage, but I really like the prospect of not having to pop out the phone (and inadvertently get distracted) every time I have to interact with my music-system.

There was a nice Sonos enabled Pi based music player with a NFC card UI written up last year.[1]

[1] https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/who-needs-vinyl-records-whe...

I've seen some neat Home Assistant-based projects with this concept as well!

You could a mix tapes of sorts. Love this idea.

I've built this exact thing last year! https://www.dinofizzotti.com/blog/2020-02-05-diskplayer-usin...

Thank you internet! This is really cool, just like I pictured it :)

My living room RPi based music solution is an old Grundig radio from the 50s, modified so I can control the volume using the actual volume control. Playback sources (currently online radio stations chosen by genre) can be switched using the physical buttons. The "off" button shuts down the Pi.

Maybe I'll do a writeup on my blog sometime, in case people would be interested...

Just great! I always wondered how one could do anything serious with a Raspi without a floppy drive! Now the gap is closed and I can finally replace my IBM 5160 mobo with a Raspi :-)

Neat. I occasionally need to create disks for some of my old computers, and while there are USB drives for 3.5" disks, I have to get my Windows 98 PC to write 5 1/4" disks(it's the easiest to get talking to my modern infrastructure) and a Raspberry Pi would a be a bit easier to get out, especially since it'd be pretty easy to ssh into headlessly, so I don't have to get out the keyboard and monitor either.

I always wanted to have an RPi, but since I accidentally ate a few SD cards I was too afraid to use it. This floppy interface is a game changer.

Is that meant to be read literally?!

I've had great luck just using USB attached storage instead of SD cards ever since the Pi3 allowed USB booting. M.sata USB 3.0 enclosures are dirt cheap and small capacity ssd's are even cheaper.

I cracked up at the first paragraphs. I too wish my Raspbrrry Pi had a floppy drive. What a great piece.

What a fun project.

The question is, will it read copy-protected floppies so you can run Lotus 1-2-3? :)

related, they make USB floppy disk drives, like https://amzn.com/B00RXEWOAA

from experience, most of those are really not that great, they tend to have a lot of problem reading disk and often refuse to even acknowledge the presence of a disk that my other devices (i keep a couple of old computer around for this purpose) read fine, and they don't always support lower density disk. I highly recommend ibm usb disk drive, they work much more reliably and you can find them for very reasonably price (i bought 10 of them), also they support more formats.

But if you want to read floppy from home computers (and the various format/disk layout that they use) the only solution that i found is KryoFlux or Greaseweazle.

If someone know of others "modern" floppy disk controller please share.

There's also the FluxEngine: http://cowlark.com/fluxengine/

(I use it as it has support for reading and writing 800KB Mac disks, which would otherwise require a special floppy drive that can change the rotation speed).

This right here. 2 parts and no OS.

I recently got the parts but haven't tried it yet. I have vinatge machines that otherwise need a real floppy controller and not a modern one (nothing found on any motherboards newer than 486's), or a catweasel (also no longer made) or a KryoFlux (the nuclear option and not open source).

Greaseweasel (https://github.com/keirf/Greaseweazle) has come along recently as an open source catweasel. (the pcb design files are there too, just buried away in a zip file in one of the wiki pages, not directly in git, so both hardware and software source is aclvailable. Follow Hardware Assembly -> F7 Lightning Plus, scroll to bottom)

But that's more complicated.

I love how the FluxEngine is really just a single off-the-shelf part. You don't even need so much as a wiring/pinout adapter pcb for the 34-pin connector. You can just solder it directly to the dev board.

As soon as they became easily available, I've bought a no name USB floppy and managed to read and store lots of stuff I still had on decades old floppies that I found at home. I could read just about everything, while many more recent CDs and DVDs I had burned years later, some containing important stuff, became unreadable after even 5 years or less. I also lost projects I burned in multiple copies on branded media and stored properly; that made me ditch completely the optical disks on all my computers since like 2006.

USB floppy disk drives are only any good at reading and writing 1.44mb disks. If you need a 720k disk for something like an Amiga/Atari ST they don't work IME (some people have claimed otherwise but I've never had any luck).

I keep an old Core Quad machine with a real floppy disk controller on it just for this reason. Windows XP / XP 64 and Linux are the only things that write to these drives properly (IIRC Windows versions after Vista don't control the floppy controller directly). I do have better options now for transferring files to these old machines.

https://www.amazon.it/gp/aw/d/B01J1RAHYQ/ref=ppx_yo_mob_b_in...

I bought that a couple of years ago, it supports both dd and hd floppies.

The capacity isn't the problem. It is the direct write access. If it is USB it tends not to have direct hardware access and it won't work no PC format disk e.g. the ADF Amiga format.

If I use a real floppy disk controller + Linux can write to those disks in the correct format. It works. I am not an expert in how any of this works though. What I have at the moment is sufficient.

I am sure people have had luck with USB drives. I have not.

Amiga disks can't be read by PC floppy controllers whether they're USB or not (barring the 2 drive hack seen here before) because they write a whole track at once and pc floppy controllers can't be programmed to understand their sector headers.

If you want to read/write Amiga disks with a PC you need a greaseweasel or a Kryoflux

Just tried it. It appears I am using cross-dos. I've still never had any luck with USB drives though (just tried a USB floppy I have as well).

They unfortunately don't make USB 5¼ inch floppy drives. But maybe with this board, one could make the Pi into a bridge between USB and a 5¼ inch drive.

> When transferring data (i.e. read sector or write sector), the floppy controller wants every byte transferred within 13ms (standard density) or 26ms (high density).

Should that not be the other way around?

I have nothing to contribute except to say that this is amazing.

Cool project!

Has this extension hat already been tested with other (non-broadcom) SOCs, that have a compatible pin-header? Any reason why it shouldn't work on a OrangePi, RockPi, xPi?

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