Arduino Powered Floppy Disk Reader and Writer

Created by Robert Smith @RobSmithDev ...with interfaces for Amiga, ATARI ST and DOS/PC Disk formats

What is it?

This project uses an Arduino to interface with a floppy disk drive and communicate with a PC in order to recover the data from any formatted disks.

The drive can be either a 8", 5 1/4" or 3 1/2" standard floppy drive. It was tested on a 3 1/2" standard PC floppy drive. Others (like the 5 1/4" standard PC floppy drive) my also work without modifications.

This configration can read SD, DD and HD floppy disk formats (AMIGA, ATARI ST, PC DOS, COMMODORE C64) and maybe more.

The Arduino firmware allows to read the raw data from each track of the floppy. Decoding of the sector data is done on the PC. Usually a floppy image file is created (ADF for AMIGA, .img for ATARI ST and PC/DOS).

It also allows you to write a backed up ADF file back onto a floppy disk!

ArduinoFloppyReader

This Visual Studio 2019 project contains two applications, a command line, and a Windows dialog based application allow reading and writing of Amiga formatted DD floppy disks.

Scripts for linux

The above application apparently works under WINE, however, Github user "kollokollo" made some scripts for reading other formats on Linux too as follows: The ATARI ST and DOS/PC floppy formats can be decoded whith these scripts. 9,10,11 or 18 Sectors per track. Up to 82 tracks, DD (ca. 800 kBytes) or HD (1.4 MBytes). The images usually contain a FAT12 file system which can be directly mounted by linuy without any additional driver.
For more information see https://github.com/kollokollo/ArduinoFloppyDiskReader/tree/new/for_linux They need the X11-Basic interpreter from http://x11-basic.sourceforge.net/

Commodore 1581 Disks

To read commodore 1581 disks, check out the project at: 
	https://github.com/hpingel/pyAccess1581

FloppyDriverController.sketch

This is the Ardunio source code/sketch for all Floppy formats.

• Detect disk density (SD/DD or HD)
• Motor ON/OFF
• Seek to Track 0
• Seek to any track (up to 82 - be careful, this can damage some drives!)
• read write protection status
• Read index pulse
• read raw track data (its, RAW, so FM, MFM; SD, DD or HD)
• write track data (unbuffered, DD, untested HD)

AVR Firmware

If you want to use the AVR directly instead of within the Arduino environment, then jump to [https://github.com/jtsiomb/usbamigafloppy] where John Tsiombikas has ported the code.

Help and Instructions

For further details including how to wire this up please visit [https://amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk]

Whats changed?

• v2.4 Improved support for Usb to Serial devices based on findings from GitHub user "prickle" - firmware is now V1.7
• v2.33 Merged with Pull Request #9 (Detect and read out HD floppy disks 1.44M by kollokollo) - firmware is now V1.6
• v2.32 Merged with Pull Request #6 (Modified the behavior of the current track location on Arduino boot - paulofduarte) which also addresses issues with some drives and updated firmware to 1.4 Made a small change to the diagnostics code to also erase the track before writing it
• v2.31 Upgraded the PC code side to work with Visual Studio 2019 resolving issue #11 (ourIThome) and merging pull request #13 (bassclefstudio) Fixed a few typos in ArduinoInterface.cpp from pull request #12 (Crkk)
• V2.2 Fixed 99% of checksum errors when writing by erasing the track first
• V2.1 Diagnostics and potential write bug fixed
• V2.0 Disk reading has been vastly improved and you can now also write disks!
• V1.0 Initial release, can read disks fairly well

Licence

This entire project is available under the GNU General Public License v3 licence. See licence.txt for more details.