The Desk of Ladyada - RETURN OF THE FLOPPY HACKING (time to write!)
0ok cats and kittens, we know you missed the floppy hackin' so you should be glad to know we're BACK on the floppy kick, with some timer driven code for capturing and generating flux pulses. we're not 100% sure we need timers to do it but we were having a few issues with writing floppies consistently so figured this could help. today we wrote an ibm mfm floppy and then read it on another floppy drive connected to our computer. being able to write floppy disks also means we may be able to categorize disk drives better since we can test writing and reading pulses. we also put together one of our 'Floopers in order to properly test a laptop drive - successfully! finally, we saw this nifty cut-tape-removal tool on twitter https://twitter.com/dannymodules/status/1490248252465184771 and we're going to try jlcpcb's 3d printing service to get a couple made since they seem super handy
The Great Search - 26 pin 1mm FPC cable for laptop floppy drive
https://www.digikey.com/short/vbzqw277
In order for our floppy accessing project to connect to laptop-style drives, we will need to source FPC (flex pcb) cables that fit the existing drives and can snake on over to our PCB. Unlike most display FPC's, these need to be 1mm pitch, and we need to watch out for whether they are A-A or A-B style. Thankfully Digi-Key stocks every length, style and pitch of FPCs you could possibly want. So let's find it and we'll order it for our prototype testing this week!
#deskofladyada #thegreatsearch #adafruit
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