The floppy drive I took from an old PC at work, and grabbed its IDE cable at the same time.īelow is a photo of liberated floppy drive from an old PC: įirst I needed to gather the hardware and interface to the floppy drive. In the attempts that follow I’m only talking about the Arduino side. Based on the speed the double density disk rotated at ( 300rpm ) and the way the data is stored ( 80 tracks, 11 sectors per track and 512 bytes per sector, encoded using MFM ), to read the data accurately I needed to be able to sample the data at 500Khz that’s quite fast when you consider the Arduino is only running at 16Mhz. QEEWiki - Counters on the ATmega168/328īased on the research I now knew theoretically how the data was written to the disk, and how the disk spun.ADF (Amiga Disk File) format FAQ by Laurent Clévy

The following websites were invaluable in my understanding on what happens and how they work: When I started this project I hadn’t got a clue how the floppy drive worked, and even less how the data was encoded onto them. I did find a project based around an FPGA which was very interesting reading, but not the direction I wanted to go, so the only option was to build a solution myself. I found a few discussions in a few groups suggesting it wouldn’t be possible. So I Googled for Arduino floppy drive reading code, and after skipping all of the projects that abused the drive to play music, I didn’t really find any solutions. Massively into electronics and having played with Atmel devices ( AT89C4051 ) whilst at University I decided to take a look at the Arduino (credit to GreatScott for the inspiration showing just how easy it is to get started) I wondered if this was possible. I was really surprised that most of it was closed source. The Amiga Forever website has an excellent list of options that include hardware, and abusing two floppy drives in a PC - Sadly none of these were an option with modern hardware, and the KryoFlux/Catweasel controllers are too expensive. Moving on, I used it as part of my GCSEs and A-Level projects (thanks to Highspeed Pascal, which was compatible with Turbo Pascal on the PC)Īnyway, that was a long time ago, and I have boxes of disks, and an A500+ that doesn’t work anymore, so I thought about backing those disks up onto my computer, for both preservation and nostalgia.

Smith corona floppy disk format