Arduino Powered Floppy Disk Reader and Writer

...with 3rd party interfaces for Amiga, ATARI ST and DOS/PC Disk formats

Created by Robert Smith @RobSmithDev https://amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk

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. This includes Windows software to copy from and to ADF files.

WinUAE

This release added support for WinUAE, and hopefully could be ported to other UAE's in the future.

Formats

The Arduino firmware allows to read the raw MFM 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).

The 'firmware' can read MFM data from SD, DD and HD disks, although HD is untested. This would therefore be able to read data from AMIGA, ATARI ST, PC DOS, COMMODORE C64 etc.

ArduinoFloppyReader

This Visual Studio 2019 and Linux project contains two applications, a command line, and a Windows dialog based application allow reading and writing of Amiga formatted DD floppy disks. Using the supplied makefile you should be able to compile this on Linux. It has been tested with Raspberry Pi OS (Raspbian - Debian-based)

Compiling on Linux x64

Makefile contains directives to produce 32bit executable. To make it usable, install these two libraries (in the example, using apt for Debian-based distros):

sudo apt install gcc-multilib
sudo apt install g++-multilib

Then execute build command:

cd ArduinoFloppyReader
cd ArduinoFloppyReader
make clean
make

It will produce ArduinoReaderWriter executable file.

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 whit 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 linux 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 Arduino 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 (un-buffered, DD, untested HD) with precompensation

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?

v2.5 (firmware 1.8a) - Add support for 'noclick'
v2.5 A whole load of changes including: Fixed an encoding issue which prevented disks being read under Kickstart 1.3 or lower. Added support for read "streaming" with index sync support
Changed read timings slightly which means more disks can now be recovered! Added support for PRECOMP disk writing to improve readability as you go past track 40 Added some new functions which allow for more direct control of the drive
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.

sblendorio / ArduinoFloppyDiskReader