Teensy / Arduino based Floppy Drive tester

This project is meant as a replacement of my old BASF 20XX disk exerciser. It has all the switches, blinking lights and numbers, but limited in its use. But it has some nice features which will find their way in this new solution.

The current solution uses a Teensy 3.2, but the current functionality would fit in any Arduino with ten I/O pins available.

Plans are:

• add exercise features from the 20XX,
• add colorful blinking lights,
• restructuring command set,
• optionally attempt to read the data signal, and export the result as flux-transition timings per track. The format would be similar to that of the CatWeasel or DiscFerret.

Versions:

• Version 0.1 first version.
• Version 0.2 added trackCount, head move patterns and rpm measurement.

Also at GitHub.

No documentation yet, but the pin-layout is in the source, and the floppy connector is a standard.

Command set:

DI[01], Direction in or out
DS[01], Drive Select on or off
Hx[01], Head Load off or on
I       List input signals and current track
M[01],  Motor off or on
P[01],  Head movement patterns; 0 = Track00 to trackCount and back, 1 = random between Track00 and trackCount.*
R,      Reset all signals (to 1)
SKnn,   Seek track (always two decimal digits)*
SR,     Measures the rotation speed in RPM*
SS[01], Side Select 0 or 1
STnn,   Execute steps (always two decimal digits)
Tnn,    Number of tracks (always two decimal digits). Default is 35.
?       Short help

*) these commands start and stop the drive (DS0 & M0 resp. DS1 M1).

The FDDexer Arduino sketch is released under the 3-clause BSD license. So instead of asking me to add a feature, you could add it yourself :-).

Last updated: 2017-05-25

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