'e's not dead yet! http://www.iomega.com/hipzip/index.html Be interesting to see if this takes off, article I read the other day said there were three or four other vendors coming out with portable devices using this disk. Gary Crowell Micron Technology -----Original Message----- From: Andrew Kunz [mailto:akunz@TDIPOWER.COM] Sent: Wednesday, October 11, 2000 5:32 AM To: PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU Subject: Re: [PIC]: Floppy storage I think Compact Flash is a much better solution these days. Higher capacity, smaller size, lower power, NO MOVING PARTS, PC-compatible. Did I forget anything? Andy Harold Hallikainen on 10/11/2000 12:17:17 AM Please respond to pic microcontroller discussion list To: PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU cc: (bcc: Andrew Kunz/TDI_NOTES) Subject: Re: [PIC]: Floppy storage I've got a product using an 18c452 with 128 kbytes of external static RAM. I'd like to add low cost removable storage, and the 3.5 inch floppy seems ideal. The drives are incredibly cheap, and so is the media. I've included a National FDC chip on the board, but have not as yet looked at writing any code for it. In this application, I'm looking at saving and loading an ascii text file to/from the disk. To keep costs down and operation simple, we have no display on the product, so the operator just hits a button to load a file from the disk and another button to save it (with some precautions to make sure current data in RAM or on disk is not accidentally wiped out). I'm thinking of using PC format with a fixed filename, again further simplifying it. There would be no way to format a disk, delete the file, etc. Just load and store. Has anyone done anything like this? Another approach I'm considering is making a very small embedded 80x6 system that is a FD to EIA232 interface. Then I could use something like DataLight's ROM-DOS and have most of the code already written. I did something like this years and years ago. There I did a 6802 system and wrote code to talk to a Commodore 1541 disk drive. On the 6802 system you could save and load applications programs, do a directory of the floppy, format floppies, etc. Again, the goal there was to try to not have to write an operating system, so I used Commodore's. So... Floppies, anyone? Harold FCC Rules Online at http://www.hallikainen.com/FccRules/ ________________________________________________________________ YOU'RE PAYING TOO MUCH FOR THE INTERNET! Juno now offers FREE Internet Access! Try it today - there's no risk! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/tagj. -- http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different ways. See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details. -- http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different ways. See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details. -- http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different ways. See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details.