Think about for a second that you just wish to copy some knowledge onto a 3.5” floppy disk. Possibly that’s some software program for a classic laptop or perhaps the corporate you’re employed for nonetheless makes use of historic methods and it’s worthwhile to import new knowledge. How would you do this? It has been a few years since motherboard producers even bothered together with floppy disk drive (FDD) controllers and connections. USB floppy drives exist, however they’re usually unreliable and compatibility is way from constant. That’s why Adafruit is creating an thrilling new answer for floppy disk drive use.

Adafruit’s engineers appear to be struggling to give you terminology to explain this machine, as a result of it could really carry out just a few totally different features. At a basic degree, it acts as an adapter between a “commonplace” FDD (extra on that in a second) and a contemporary PC. That lets customers again up the information on floppy disks for archives and in addition write new knowledge to floppy disks. This machine can even again up floppy disk knowledge to an SD card with out bringing a pc into the combination in any respect.

These features are very helpful to these of us concerned in retrocomputing. Floppy disks are infamous for being very vulnerable to knowledge corruption, so archiving their contents onto extra strong media can — fairly actually — stop the whole lack of probably irreplaceable info. Writing knowledge is much less dramatic, however arguably extra useful when tinkering with outdated computer systems.

This machine’s PCB has a 5V/12V Molex connector, a 34-pin IDC connector, and a 26-pin FPC connector. Between these, customers ought to be capable of join nearly any 3.5” FDD, most 5.25” FDDs, and perhaps even some 8” FDDs. Adafruit’s engineers are even contemplating including a Disk ][ connector for the Apple crowd—something that I’d love to have when working with my Apple ][c.

A Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller interfaces with the FDD to read and write data. The PCB contains an optional SD card slot for computer-free backups and a 1.3” color TFT screen for status information. The power supply is 12V and there is a buck converter to bring that down to 5V for that power rail. If 12V isn’t necessary, power can come entirely from the USB-C port.