Re: Yee-Haa!! 5.25-inch USB floppy!

On Wed, 1 Aug 2007 20:29:58 -0400, "Tom Lake" <tlake@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:


I'll repeat myself, fine an old machine and DON'T run NT4, XP or VISTA
so that you can freely acess the hardware. W98se is fine for this and
will network nicely enough for transfers.

Allison

Ya just don't get it! I'm offering to hire someone to build me
a 5.25" floppy to USB interface. I know it is easier in the short
run to keep an old machine around but that's not an option here.
I need to be able to move a floppy drive between many machines
that can't access a 5.25" floppy drive directly. *That* is the limiting
parameter and any scenario which doesn't allow it is no solution.

Tom Lake

Actually I do get it, "Translation I want and somebodies gotta do it".
The horrible fact of life is that current PCs FDC and floppy are
being dropped or soon to be. The 1.44mb drive is no longer a
fit with 4GB thumb drives and the like. It's already reached maye
even passed the point where people buy USB or before that parallel
port devices to fill the gap of the PC not having a floppy or at least
not the correct one. When does USB go poof like the floppy?

But I'd not get involved in the folly of designing and building a one
off (you might sell a few) then having to support it on maybe three
OSs two of which or horrid and one that comes in far to many flavors.
There are many here that can do it, I can but, will not as it's a lot
of effort for something that has a simpler less costly solution.

For those that forget the dimensions of the task are.

Box with N many drives, likely two to satisfy the various drive
needs. Thats a mechanical problem mostly. it needs power as
well and most 5.25" drives cannot be powered off the USB bus.

Firmware for the microcontroller with USB and FDC interfaces,
the firmware needs to handle all possible FDC formats.

Software for the host as the standard host driver will not recognize
the special USB devices capability, it will have to be a registered
driver as XP and Vista are likely targets.

Software to talk to that driver to do the capture and organization
of the data retrieved. It would also have to configure and
otherwise monitor/control the USB device.

How much you willing to pay? I figure it's a few weeks work
between the hardware and then the PC based software for first proto.
For a serious moment I'd estimate it as a minimum of 60 billable
hours and I'd think at a bargan rate of say $50/hr it's a $3000 plus,
material and external charges (machine shop, PC board fab,
software development tools, misc materials) are on top of that.
I'm sure most would say I've estimated low.

Myself I'd invest in a used machine and use the remaining cash to
holidy in a nice sunny island.

The cheap way is to get a older PC (they are usually free) with decent
NIC in it or even a USB and use that with the correct cables
as a transfer machine. With available software you're there
in a few minutes to a few hours at most.

Then again I have PDP-11, uVAX,, AmproLb+, KayproII and 4/84,
Visual1050, DEC Vt180, NS* plus a few S100 machines that read
those formats natively. Add a few old 486s with NICs that do ok
for the less esoteric soft sector formats. Sure, I don't do all
(Apple for one) but that covers most of what I consider relevent to
me. The problem of multiple formats and media incompatability has
been familiar one since 1977 which is when I fired up my first floppy.
It was 5..25" hard sector in a world of 8" SSSD, Paper tape, Audio
casette and even Barcode. Since then I've realized that no matther
how I standardized everything I still had to retain foreign format
capability.


Allison



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