SD Floppy Emulator without LCD

[tweebs]

I've been looking for a reasonably priced emulator for some time now for personal projects. Great job guys!

The instrument company I work for is looking for a solution to aging scientific instruments that use floppy disks. These instruments use 2 standard floppy drives with drive selection jumpers. One of the problems is we've purchased the the remaining stock (worldwide) of the drives with drive selection jumpers and they aren't making anymore. We can't rewrite the firmware in our instrument.

These specific instruments utilize MS-DOS formated disks but they are never removed from the drives. We wouldn't have to change floppies at any point. Is there a way to setup your emulator so it loads 2 floppy images, one as the A drive one as the B drive (both with twisted and untwisted floppy cables) automatically without user interaction at the start? I think the ideal situation would be to have folders "A" and "B" on the SD card and it would load whatever image is in those respective folder as the drive image. This way we could provide a SD card with all the images for each instrument type in the root and then just copy whichever image we need to the respective folder set the jumpers for twisted or untwisted cable and done.

This would also eliminate the need for a LCD and buttons and possibly other components, I think the status lights would be helpful though.

I know there are some commercial emulators available but it's been more cost effective to replace broken floppy drives with floppy drives. The ones I've seen would require 1 emulator for 1 floppy drive, meaning we would need two.

Are there any plans to mass produce your emulator? Would you be willing to license your design? It would be nice if we could buy this as an off-the-shelf part in large quantity.

I'm sure there is a BIG market for a reasonably priced floppy emulator in the instrument market. Not just with my company (which is one of the largest) but I see many old instruments still running off of floppy drives.

It would be nice if there was a case mount available with faceplate to directly swap with a standard PC floppy drive.

It took some digging to find your project, google wasn't much help. Thankfully it turned up when searching EBay for a floppy emulator. I will be buying one shortly to test.

Please contact me at my email if you would like more details.

[Jeff]

These specific instruments utilize MS-DOS formated disks but they are never removed from the drives. We wouldn't have to change floppies at any point. Is there a way to setup your emulator so it loads 2 floppy images, one as the A drive one as the B drive (both with twisted and untwisted floppy cables) automatically without user interaction at the start? I think the ideal situation would be to have folders "A" and "B" on the SD card and it would load whatever image is in those respective folder as the drive image. This way we could provide a SD card with all the images for each instrument type in the root and then just copy whichever image we need to the respective folder set the jumpers for twisted or untwisted cable and done.
This would also eliminate the need for a LCD and buttons and possibly other components, I think the status lights would be helpful though.

Yes this something possible. The LCD is already optional.

I know there are some commercial emulators available but it's been more cost effective to replace broken floppy drives with floppy drives. The ones I've seen would require 1 emulator for 1 floppy drive, meaning we would need two.

Are there any plans to mass produce your emulator? Would you be willing to license your design? It would be nice if we could buy this as an off-the-shelf part in large quantity.

I'm sure there is a BIG market for a reasonably priced floppy emulator in the instrument market. Not just with my company (which is one of the largest) but I see many old instruments still running off of floppy drives.

What do you call a mass production here ? how many units you need ?

Try to contact me at :