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Interfacing microcontroller with floppy drive?

C

Chaos Master

Jan 1, 1970
0
Does anybody here knows how to interface a floppy drive (3 1/2") with a
microcontroller? I would like to have the microcontroller get a listing of the
files on the floppy drive - and output it on a LCD display. This would be for a
device for quick checking of floppy disk contents - would be useful for me.

What microcontroller I could use?
Where to find technical info about floppy drives?
Any IC's that could be useful to interface to a floppy drive?

Thanks for attention!
 
H

hamilton

Jan 1, 1970
0
Sorry, This can _not_ be done with just a micro. ( no matter how fast )

The data rate is to hi to sync up with.

check this data sheet to understand why.

http://www.smsc.com/main/catalog/fdc37c78.html

This chip works well, software is sort of easy on a fast 8051.
( Dallas 80c320 ).
 
J

Joel Kolstad

Jan 1, 1970
0
hamilton said:
Sorry, This can _not_ be done with just a micro. ( no matter how fast )

I disagree. You give me, oh, a 100MHz or better microcontroller with
nothing else to do and a bunch of built-in I/O, I'll give you a MFM decoder
for regular 1.44MB PC-formatted disks (1Mbps).

This is, of course, a waste of about 95% of the transistors in a
microcontroller... (Then again, those guys at Scenix seem to like this
approach to building peripherals... hmm.... maybe one of those 50MHz Scenix
PIC clones could do this after all!)

---Joel Kolstad
 
R

Rene Tschaggelar

Jan 1, 1970
0
You can always have an FPGA doing the fast stuff.

Rene
 
T

Tim Auton

Jan 1, 1970
0
Stef Mientki said:
Does anyone still use floppies these days ?

Old floppies that have been unused for years are being pressed into
service again thanks to Viagra ;)


Tim
 
H

hamilton

Jan 1, 1970
0
Sounds like a marketing opportunity!! Go for it !!! :)
 
C

Chaos Master

Jan 1, 1970
0
In an arcane spellbook written by the priests, labeled 'Posts of
sci.electronics.design' I found a message from
hamilton[[email protected]]:

Hamilton,
Sorry, This can _not_ be done with just a micro. ( no matter how fast )

The data rate is to hi to sync up with.

check this data sheet to understand why.

http://www.smsc.com/main/catalog/fdc37c78.html

This chip works well, software is sort of easy on a fast 8051.
( Dallas 80c320 ).

This is interesting! I will take a look. Thanks!
 
C

Chaos Master

Jan 1, 1970
0
In an arcane spellbook written by the priests, labeled 'Posts of
sci.electronics.design' I found a message from Stef
Mientki[[email protected]]:

Stef,
Does anyone still use floppies these days ?

Yes.
You can't update a PC BIOS from a CD-ROM, AFAIK.
You can make a small Linux-based firewall/router in a 1.44MB floppy, using a 486
with 66MHz clock.
You can have a quick tool for getting to a DOS prompt when Windows gets mangled.

And there are other uses. Be creative!
 
P

Paul Hovnanian P.E.

Jan 1, 1970
0
Chaos said:
In an arcane spellbook written by the priests, labeled 'Posts of
sci.electronics.design' I found a message from Stef
Mientki[[email protected]]:

Stef,
Does anyone still use floppies these days ?

Yes.
You can't update a PC BIOS from a CD-ROM, AFAIK.
You can make a small Linux-based firewall/router in a 1.44MB floppy, using a 486
with 66MHz clock.
You can have a quick tool for getting to a DOS prompt when Windows gets mangled.

Anyone make a BIOS that will boot off a USB key fob drive yet?
 
T

Tim Auton

Jan 1, 1970
0
Paul Hovnanian P.E. said:
Chaos said:
In an arcane spellbook written by the priests, labeled 'Posts of
sci.electronics.design' I found a message from Stef
Mientki[[email protected]]:
Does anyone still use floppies these days ?

Yes.
You can't update a PC BIOS from a CD-ROM, AFAIK.

If the PC can boot from the CD you can stick a copy of DOS and your
flash utility on it just like you can with a floppy.
Anyone make a BIOS that will boot off a USB key fob drive yet?

I seem to recall Dell were looking at making bootable USB key fobs
(for Ford's network initially).


Tim
 
T

Tim Shoppa

Jan 1, 1970
0
Tim Auton said:
I seem to recall Dell were looking at making bootable USB key fobs
(for Ford's network initially).

Great. Now my key fob can get a virus.

Tim.
 
J

Joel Kolstad

Jan 1, 1970
0
Tim Auton said:
I seem to recall Dell were looking at making bootable USB key fobs
(for Ford's network initially).

I read an article perhaps a year ago about how the BIOS of PCs was
supposedly going to change in the coming years so as to be (1) written in a
high level language! and (2) more extensible, so that you could easily boot
off of USB flash ROM drives, USB hard drives, etc.

For people setting up (cloning) PCs around the workplace (there are a lot of
these people out there!), the usual approach is still either booting to DOS
with a network 'boot' disk so that something like a Norton Ghost image can
be accessed off of a server (Ghost runs in DOS!), or actually opening up the
PC and connecting a second hard drive temporarily to boot from and create
the image. Being able to boot from a USB 2.0 hard drive instead would be a
boon!

There was some manufacturer... Sun, maybe?, whose plug-in cards had boot
ROMs written in some tokenized language rather than straight assembly,
thereby making them (theoretically) usable on any machine that had the
interpreter for that language. The idea being that initial boot-time
software wasn't performance critical (even if we are talking about, e.g., a
SCSI interface card) and therefore portability concerns won out. Anyone
know the details of this?

I have come across the occasional PCI video card that had a Macintosh/PC
jumper -- just switched an address line on a PROM so that the proper code
was used!

---Joel Kolstad
 
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