Picking up after a month hiatus, I’ve assembled one unit of the Daisy Chainer for the Floppy Emu disk emulator, and it seems to be working. I’ve only had time to do brief testing, but so far so good, and the power/ground weirdness observed in the breadboard prototype appears to be gone. Some parts that I planned for proved to be unnecessary, so you can see a few unpopulated footprints on the board. To be removed in a version 2 PCB, maybe.
The Daisy Chainer board makes it possible to insert a Floppy Emu anywhere into your daisy chain of Apple II drives, with other floppy drives before and/or after it in the chain. It provides a nice improvement in flexibility for Apple IIGS owners and other Apple II users with complex drive setups.
As seen in the photos, I ultimately went with the “smart” design that I discussed earlier, with an ATMEGA48 microcontroller in charge of the show. But the firmware couldn’t be simpler: it’s just a 12-instruction loop that reads some inputs, updates three bits of state, and uses a lookup table to determine some output values. I’m still not convinced this was the best approach, since I could have performed the same function with just 2 or 3 basic logic ICs. But the microcontroller is no more expensive, and it’s more compact, and more flexible, so maybe it’s OK even if it does feel like overkill.
Usage is simple: just plug it in and turn it on. The male DB19 (at left in the photo) connects to the upstream drive in the daisy chain, or directly to the computer if there’s no upstream drive. The female DB19 (at right) connects to the downstream drive, and the Floppy Emu connects to the 2×10 header with its ribbon cable. There are no user controls and nothing to configure. The only nod to “human interface” is a set of three LEDs that might be useful for debugging, or for curious nerds. They show the status signals used for detecting the drive type of the Floppy Emu and the downstream drive.
