OR... you could use a Commodore (commode door?) 1541 drive.  It has a
clocked serial interface (a serialized IEEE488 bus) for the interface.
About 15 years ago I wrote an interface between Microsoft 6800 Basic and
that drive.  There are a few hundred systems still in use.

Harold



On Fri, 16 Jan 1998 16:17:52 -0500 Mike Keitz <mkeitz@JUNO.COM> writes:
>On Fri, 16 Jan 1998 17:51:53 -0000 Gareth McClean
><gmcclean@STBNI.CO.UK>
>writes:
>>I'm interested to find anyone who has interfaced a PIC to a standard
>>floppy drive for data storage.
>
>The major problem is that an entire sector must be written at once.
>This
>means the controller needs enough RAM or other fast-access memory to
>store a whole sector's data (typically 512 bytes) at once or some way
>to produce the data on the fly.  No PIC chips have 512 bytes of RAM.
>So an external memory chip of some sort will be needed.
>As for hardware, I'd use a PC type floppy controller chip or card,
>which
>goes in one chip from MFM to 8-bit parallel.  Most of these have a
>couple of serial ports and a parallel port as bonus.  These chips may
>buffer a few bytes, but generally count on the host being able to
>supply the data fast enough.