Re: [avr-gcc-list] Off topic question - 3 1/2 PC Floppy drive

[Marek Michalkiewicz]

> I need to read data from a 1.44 MB floppy drive using an AT90S8535.
> Is it posible? If so please send some info I mean any help would be
> appreciated.

You would need a floppy controller chip, and these are quite hard to
program, especially as AVR has no DMA controller, so you have to read
the data quickly or it will be lost, and the 8535 has no external
address/data bus, and emulating that in software is slow...

Some alternatives:

 - IDE floppy drive: not as common and may be expensive.
 - CompactFlash card: reasonably easy to connect (like a normal IDE hard
   disk, 8-bit data bus is sufficient) and program (no hard real time
   requirements), cheap USB-CF and PCMCIA-CF adapters are available, so
   you can access the card on a desktop/notebook PC.

Besides, floppies are so unreliable...  Use it a few times, and it
starts developing bad sectors.  So, if you don't absolutely require
floppy disks (just some small removable media), I'd suggest to go
for CompactFlash instead.

Marek

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