Friday, October 29, 2010

Arduino Floppy Drive Shield

Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse. Have you ever wanted to hook a 3.5" floppy drive up to an Arduino?

No?

Well, I have...

Figure 1.0: Taking Something Horrible and Making It Worse

Don't worry - At the moment this is nothing more than a stupid picture and a hunk of protoboard jammed into the top of an unsuspecting Arduino. Implementing a floppy drive controller in software would be a bit of a challenge, however there is no reason it couldn't be done; though some(most) would argue it shouldn't.

For some reason floppy drives make me smile whenever I see them. I'm not sure whether it's their uselessly small data storage capacity or that satisfying "ka-chunck" sound when loading a diskette into a drive, but there's something there that you just can't get with USB flash drives.

2 comments:

  1. Tell me you made it work. I really want to read data from floppies from an arduino or raspberry pi from the PATA interface.

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  2. for the raspberry just use a usb floppy drive, also floppys don't use PATA

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