Interfacing with floppy drive

Forum 2005-2010 (read only) Hardware Interfacing
1

Howdy,

I'm interested in making use of old floppy drives.

I'm curious about driving the 2 motors, the stepper with the
linear actuator to move the heads, and the motor which rotates
the disk.

Are there code libraries available to help drive these?

Thanks,
Kent

2

I tried this a while ago and gave up from the lack of help

what I had made so far

http://wtfmoogle.com/arduino/floppybrd.jpg
http://wtfmoogle.com/arduino/floppysch.png

3

Interesting.

So you got as far as designing the connections, identifying the pin usage.

Did you build anything?, write any code?

Thanks,
Kent

4

Do you want to read/write data? That would be a huge challenge.

If all you want to do is spin the motor and move the heads in and out, it's just a matter of twiddling a few digital lines. It's been so long since I worked with low-level floppy controller software I've forgotten the details, but I'm sure they're on the web.

Ran

5

Upping this post, since I'm planning to make an Arduino-based floppy controller :-D. I'll get started asap. I'd love to see the photos from Hyperjer's post though but the links are broken...

6

Has anyone managed to do this? I would really like to interface with a 5.25 floppy drive if possible, but 3.5 would be a great start.

7

If you do some searching for "floppy the robot", you'll find info about how to interface with the port on the floppy to control the motors. The project details using a floppy drive as a crude robot chassis (interfaced to the parallel port, or maybe a PIC or Basic Stamp - I forget).

Interfacing with the drive itself to read/write data is a whole 'nother thing entirely - I'm not even sure if the interface is 16 bit or 8 bit, off the top of my head - it should be possible to do - but whether there is enough code/data/ram space on the Arduino to do it or be useful is different issue...

:slight_smile: