On Wed, Mar 20, 2002 at 06:33:38PM -0500, Olin Lathrop wrote:
> > I'm wondering if there is already some type of interface already out there
> > that would handle all of the critical parts of creating a file on a floppy
> > drive.
> >
> > I think it would be cool to be able to store a data in a text file from a
> > pic on to a floppy disk and then be able read the data on the PC.
>
> Talking to a floppy directly from a PIC will be much harder than talking to
> an IDE drive.  The floppy bus was invented by Shugart, who was making drives.
> They tried to make as much as possible someone else's problem, whether it
> made sense from an overall system point of view or not.  The data on the
> floppy bus is pulses for flux transitions.  At least with IDE you can talk
> in sectors.  If you really want to talk to a floppy, using a controller chip
> will save a lot of trouble.  Unfortunately, these aren't made any more (as
> far as I know).  The floppy disk controller nowadays is integrated into a
> corner of the silicon for implementing the "standard" motherboard devices on
> PC systems.

Correct.

The solution I thought of but haven't had a chance to implement was using
an LS-120 drive. It reads and writes floppies but has a standard IDE
interface. I haven't investigated it very throughly but it would seem that
since the IDE interface is the only one on the drive that it would have
to be used to interface to the floppy and not just the LS120 disk.
>
> I've just recently completed a project that had to do with a 16F877
> connected to a floppy bus, so I'm familiar with what goes over that bus.

Sounds painful.

BAJ

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