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Has anyone ever purchased or used this USB floppy drive (5.25") interface?

I considered buying one but passed when I saw it was read-only.
 
Same-oh, same-oh. Just an MCU running a timer in "capture" mode, the same as everyone else (e.g. greaseweazel, etc.). Older design, however. Writing can be accomplished using the same timer in PWM mode, but few bother.
 
I had a thread on this last year and it seems to repeatedly boil down to it's not as easy to make a 5.25" floppy drive readable and writable over USB in the same fashion it works with 3.5" USB drives. It has been proven that it is possible, but a number of hacks are required because at all points in history the idea seemed to boil down to "don't waste time on something so stupid! Why would anyone need a 5.25" floppy drive on USB?"
 
Shame. Youd think the the rising number of vintage computer hobbyists and the money they are willing to burn someone would revisit this.
 
Revisit how? There are ICs around that give a USB 1.1 interface to standard disk drives. I believe that Jim Brain is looking at this.
The problem is that any USB mass storage device operates with an encapsulated SCSI protocol. That alone limits the utility, not to mention support for only a few standard formats. A legacy floppy interface is far more versatile.
 
VERAULT said:
I was going through an old email from 2013 and I made a note to myself about this device. I instead bought a kryoflux and forgot about it. But does anyone out there have experience with this controller? http://shop.deviceside.com/prod/FC5025
Click to expand...
I bought one years ago, and still use it from time to time. Works quite well, for what it is. Yes, it doesn't handle the world, but it was ideal for recovering my 5.25" IBM formatted disks. I did not try reading other formats with it (didn't need it at the time).

The Greaseweasel certainly is a better choice for general purpose (and, I suppose, special purpose :) use, but as a read-only, getting-stuff-off-IBM-media, the FC5025 is fine.
 
Given that most ARM development suites have canned versions of client USB MSD libraries, I suspect a DOS-only USB adapter could be worked out quite readily using little more than a cheap Black Pill. But I've got lots of legacy-floppy systems as well as MCU readers and a couple of Catweasels, so I don't have any real need.

Re: FlashFloppy. I once asked for a document detailing the layout of a FF image file. I had an oddball GCR 100 tpi floppy with an oddball bit data rate. The only response I received was "read the source code and figure it out". Feh--if a developer doesn't have the time to document his work, I'm not going to fool with it.
 
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