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Using a pair of broken 1571s; SD card idea.

NathanAllan

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Jun 1, 2003
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Bellevue, Colorado
Just tossing this out there. I'm picking up a pair of 1571 drives soon, both are non working and might need alignment, not sure. I know there is an SD card reader that you can buy for the C64 but I'd rather adapt this drive over to use an SD card. I'm not sure anybody has ever done this.

There are replacement drives that specifically adapt floppy drives to use SD cards, so i am thinking along that route, and I'm not afraid to get into the guts of the thing (since I have a couple of working drives and they're not particularly collectible seeing as how they are quite common) and replace the entire drive part with an SD card reader.

It's all maybes at this point, I have to get them first and go from there.
 
Why not! I don't remember which one, but one of the SD card drive emulators even makes the typical 1541 drive sounds...
 
I picked up the drives and they look okay, the owner said that they just don't read disks and the mech handles for latching down the drives' "doors" are off and in a small plastic baggie. Unfortunately the project will have to wait, though it's a good one.

The owner also told me that he has about 20 C128's that he's going through all with bad keyboards. I have two with bad memory on the mainboards so I might be able to trade a few parts as well as finally get a power supply for my own rig. My power supply died a while back and it had already been repaired once, looked like, and the transformer just bit the big one.

Hopefully I'll hear from him again soon. he might give me a couple of 128's that I can repair.
 
Interesting project. Are you thinking of the HxC 3.5" floppy drive emulator, or are there other devices replacing floppy disks with SD cards? Would the drive provide a 34 pin interface to connect to the floppy drive controller, serving one floppy disk image at a time using switches? Remember the 1571 mainly is a GCR unit, although it can be made to read MFM floppy disks too, in case it matters.

Of course if you want to be lazy, get a uIEC/SD or any other sd2iec device and simply mount it inside the 1571. It will be a bit bulky compared to the required footprint, but it would work out of the box.
 
yes, very nicely done! I'm a fan of the blue.

I was thinking of replacing just the drive mechanism but I might go full on internal guts replacement and add different hardware inside. Not sure what I would add, but it's on the back burner for now. Not sure how the actual mechanism is done on the inside, carlsson. When I get to work on it, it'll be an interesting project.
 
The case was badly yellowed and I couldn't be bothered to do special color matching for new paint. I had a can of blue handy, so... :)

g.
 
side note - it's pretty easy to re-align a 1571 drive, compared to any other CBM-type drive. Free Spirit has a nice drive alignment helper program
 
I'm aware of the HxC (70 Euros or so) but I don't know if it would work in this application. There also is the FlexiDrive which can be yours for $385 (nope, that is not a typo!) but again I don't know if it would do what you want it to. I also found a DIY hack to add a SD card reader to a router, using the SPI bit banging. You might be able to build your own bit banging interface with custom 1571 ROM - sounds a bit like a project for Ruud.
 
The case was badly yellowed and I couldn't be bothered to do special color matching for new paint. I had a can of blue handy, so... :)

g.

LOL ... great idea, put the SD card port reader in the floppy port, now you only need to print a sticker with a floppy disk image, stick it on your SD card and you've done, once upon a time there was the 8" floppy disk, now we introduce the 1/8" floppy SDisk :D

Just add an MP3 player, a speaker and some .mp3 with floppy disk noises ;-)
 
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