Is it possible a floppy disk by Arduino on Gigatron?

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giobbi
Posts: 38
Joined: 11 Jul 2021, 22:12

Is it possible a floppy disk by Arduino on Gigatron?

Post by giobbi »

hi all,

I was looking at the David Hansel's project (https://github.com/dhansel/ArduinoFDC) about to drive a floppy disk from an Arduino (various flavors) and I was wondering if there's a way to hook up a floppy disk drive to the Gigatron. Since the David's project uses the same pins used by Babelfish, I suppose another board should to be used (as far as either Babelfish or the David's sketch can be redirected on the analog input pins); also because, maybe, the Uno memory isn't enough to store both Babelfish and the FDD libraries.

Unfortunately I must to admit I haven't the skill to do that, but just in case anybody here was wondering a more vintage way to save and read from any (still to be developed) Gigatron program...
at67
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Joined: 14 May 2018, 08:29

Re: Is it possible a floppy disk by Arduino on Gigatron?

Post by at67 »

You would pretty much have to duplicate what Norgate did with Pluggy Reloaded and his SD Card reader, as you surmised Arduino's run out of storage very quickly when using external libraries, i.e. I doubt you could fit the SD and floppy libraries in a typical device.
giobbi
Posts: 38
Joined: 11 Jul 2021, 22:12

Re: Is it possible a floppy disk by Arduino on Gigatron?

Post by giobbi »

at67 wrote: 18 Sep 2021, 06:39 You would pretty much have to duplicate what Norgate did with Pluggy Reloaded and his SD Card reader, as you surmised Arduino's run out of storage very quickly when using external libraries, i.e. I doubt you could fit the SD and floppy libraries in a typical device.
yep, definitely the SD card reader is better and more useful... but I believe a real floppy disk would be more fun and vintage... just for fun, not for real use. IMO there's no need to put SD and floppy libraries together.
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