USB 5.25" floppy drive - do it

From: Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk_at_yahoo.co.uk>
Date: Fri Jun 11 05:30:01 2004

On Fri, 2004-06-11 at 05:24, Geoff Reed wrote:
> -SNip-
>
> >One thing I'd like is an inexpensive PC device to talk to a floppy drive
> >directly and then be able to do all the necessary processing in
> >software.
> -End Snip-
>
> not the cheapest thing out there, but a catweasel does that pretty well...

sure, but as I'm broke it'd be nice to build something out of bits I
have lying around :-) The thing being external would be nice too, and
swappable between machines easily. Plus I gather there's still an
element of coding involved to get the Catweasel to actually do anything
useful.

Having said all that, I need to sit down and see if this is at all
possible. It's quite likely that the data rate through the port just
won't be high enough without external buffering - borne out by the fact
that I've never heard of anyone else doing this!

Plus I'm not sure how the raw data stream is clocked (rather, I have the
info here, I just can't remember without going to look it up). If the
floppy drive just starts spewing out raw data on a read but the clock is
handled at the host side then I might have problems there...

cheers

Jules
Received on Fri Jun 11 2004 - 05:30:01 BST