I’m almost ready to start selling Floppy Emu hardware! My plan is to offer two options: a fully assembled and tested unit, and a “DIY kit” containing the PCB board, LCD, and DB-19 connector. These are the hardest parts to find, and the ones where shipping costs kill you if buying individual quantities, so the DIY kit should be helpful for people making their own builds. The assembled units will be hand-built and tested by me, and I’m a little scared about signing myself up for that much labor. If there’s enough demand I’ll look into having an electronics assembly shop do the work, but I expect large quantities are necessary for that to be economical. I haven’t decided on prices yet, but it’ll be low enough that people find it a good value, while still high enough to make it worth my time and effort.
Meanwhile, feature development continues. I’ve completed a revision 1.1 board, which has a number of small changes:
- LCD backlight
- mounting holes (can build a case for the board)
- support for the lock tab on the SD card
- removed the motor LED, since motor status is now displayed on the LCD
- removed the unused JTAG connector footprint
- repositioned the buttons and status LED
- added a test point for oscilloscope probing
- probably some other things I forgot
I also added support for Disk Copy 4.2 disk images, long filename support, and subdirectories on the SD card (see photo). Things were getting a little out of hand once there were more than a few dozen disk images on the SD card, and the subdirectories really help. This makes OS installs almost enjoyable! Just download the disk images from Apple, copy them to your SD card, boot the Mac from the Install Disk 1 image, and off you go.
The last major piece of the puzzle is 1.4 MB write support. I’ve got this partly working already, and writes of individual sectors and small files are OK, but writing a larger file to a 1.4 MB emulated floppy causes things to go haywire. The lack of any real debugging tools (other than printing to the screen) makes this a pain to troubleshoot, but I think I’m pretty close to resolving it.