There was an experiment floating around since 1999 to take a hard disk image file used by emulators and stream it over a serial port to a real apple II(GS) computer. That sat around for over a decade when someone started asking about it, the author of ADTpro (apple disk transfer, take floppy image, copy it over serial to 5.25 inch floppy) noticed, patched it up to work with any apple II/III computer and started to include it with the standard ADT pro files.
Once it was working I decided I was going to port it to a stand alone device, along with ADT itself. havent made it far with ADT but the virtual serial drive is working with an arduino giving my 1986 apple //c a hard disk with a 115,200 baud interface (much faster than a floppy, not quite as fast as something that plugs into the apple's bus, but the //c does not have any slots so I cant use them anyway.)
I am making a limited run of devices, all SMD in a nice case, but before I go though that I wanted to check my schematic against a real device, a "sanity check". This sanity check is made on some radio shack perfboard and performs flawlessly (though I have some HF noise coming from the regulators I would like to clean up first)
That's pretty awesome! I'm definitely interested in this; please keep me up-to-date on your progress and such. Are you going to publish the schematic, etc for the device? I'd be perfectly happy with a similar "perfboard" version! Thanks!
yes everything is being produced under creative commons non commercial. I am nearly geared up for a production run of 10 with machined pac-tech boxes, SMD boards, wall warts and a floppy disk.
That being said, yes I am producing files for through hole versions if one wants to roll their own, this has been a priority since day one and has been considered in design.
The software is open source, the original PC version is written in JAVA, and of course my end of it is in Arduino, the apple II client software is mostly ASM but also available as oss.
The second major factor I am working on is porting the disk transfer utility to arduino as well, since the II series spanned from 1977 to 1992 there are many programs that didnt "play well" using their own "os" disk loaders and disk formats that just wont work with hard drives. That way I can just take a disk image, plop it on the SD card, use the ADTpro client to transfer to real disks without having to connect it to a PC first.
I'd love to build one myself. Have you released the schematic and code yet? I saw the ones on your site from last year, but are they the most up-to-date versions?