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Moar Floppy Emu!
With the missing parts finally on hand, I was able put in some quality soldering time this weekend and build a whole pile of Floppy Emus. If you’ve been waiting, then wait no longer: they’re available...
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Outsourced PCB Assembly and Testing
Help request! If any reader has experience taking a hobby-scale electronics project to an outside vendor for assembly, I’d love to hear from you. I’ve been talking with the fab in China that makes the...
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How to Manufacture a Widget
So you’ve designed an electronic gizmo, it works nicely, and the public wants to buy it. You’ve built one, or ten, or a hundred by hand until your soldering iron wore out, and now you’re ready to have...
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Troubleshooting Damaged Chips
There’s a big difference between building one of something, and building a hundred. When building one, the challenge is simply to get the thing working at all. When building a hundred, the focus...
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Floppy Emu Backlight
I’m something of an anti-backlight guy, and I intentionally designed Floppy Emu with the LCD screen’s backlight disabled. Without the backlight, the text is crisp and the contrast is excellent. With...
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Fresh from the Factory
It’s been quiet here in electronics hobby land, but I do have some good news to report: as of now, all Floppy Emu boards are professionally assembled by Microsystems Development Technologies in...
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Floppy Emu “Scratch and Dent” Sale
Sometimes a Floppy Emu board fails one of my functional tests, and I can’t find the cause of the problem. I have several boards that appear to work fine for 400K and 800K disk emulation (tested on a...
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LEGO Case for Floppy Emu
Chris Siegle has designed an amazing Floppy Emu case made entirely out of LEGO bricks! The case features LED “light tubes” and working buttons. Step-by-step build instructions are here. Thanks Chris!...
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Designing a Laser-Cut Enclosure
An official laser-cut case for Floppy Emu has finally arrived! It took a lot of prototyping and fiddling with tiny parts, but I hope you’ll agree the result was worth it. The case is only 6mm larger...
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Acrylic, Wood, Hardboard, Oh My!
The revision 4 Floppy Emu cases are here, and they look great! Clear and black acrylic in different layouts, birch plywood, and chocolate-colored hardboard. I’m having too much fun putting these...
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Floppy Emu Cases are Here!
Custom-made cases for Floppy Emu are finally here, and available for sale now on the Floppy Emu home page! These laser-cut enclosures will keep your board protected in style. The clear acrylic...
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Floppy Emu, Year 1
It’s been roughly a year since I turned a personal electronics project into a retrocomputing mini-business, which makes now a good time for a short review. When I started dabbling in floppy disk...
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Reverse Engineering the HD20
Finally after nine months, a progress update on HD20 emulation! Back in February I wrote about my efforts to reverse engineer the Apple HD20, an external 20 MB hard drive for the Macintosh that was...
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HD20 Firmware 0.1
Good news, HD20-ers! I have rudimentary HD20 emulation working now, and I was able to use it to boot my Mac Plus. This runs on the standard Floppy Emu hardware, which means the same hardware can...
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Floppy Emu, $10 Off This Week
Both models of Floppy Emu boards are on sale this week, $10 off until December 5. If you’ve been holding off on getting one, now’s your chance! With the new HD20 firmware hopefully finished soon, the...
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HD20 Firmware 0.3: Fixes for 020 and 030 Macs
I’ve fixed an HD20 emulation bug that caused occasional errors on faster 68020- and 68030-based Macs. The symptom was a “NEG COMMAND SIZE” error message on the LCD screen, and I/O failure. This...
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HD20 Firmware 0.4: Write Support!
Firmware 0.4 adds support for writing to the emulated HD20 disk drive. No more read-only disks! I’ve tested it with a Mac Plus and a Mac IIsi, copying lots of files about and moving the mouse in crazy...
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Emu Firmware 0.5: Floppy and HD20 Combined!
Ta dah! I thought it couldn’t be done, but I used my hammer and tongs to smash HD20 emulation and floppy emulation into a single firmware version. No more re-flashing the board when you want to switch...
View ArticleEmu Firmware 0.6: Formatting the HD20
Firmware 0.6A-F14 now supports formatting the emulated HD20 disk from the Finder. This is handy for creating new hard disk images without the aid of programs like Mini vMac or Basilisk II. Just grab...
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Emu Firmware 0.7: Performance Improvements
Firmware 0.7A-F14 improves write performance for HD20 emulation. With the old firmware, if you wrote a 1 MB file to the disk, it would do 2000 separate 512 byte writes to the SD card. SD cards really...
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