Coming soon - hippity hoppity here comes a floppity πΎ π
We had a quest to do some floppy projects back in 2022 (https://blog.adafruit.com/2022/02/09/refactor-of-adafruit_floppy-for-timer-support-mac-disk-success/) but our eyes were bigger than our BOM - many components we designed into this floppy interface board were not available⦠but now we're back and it's time to make the bestest floppy archiver/writer/emulator(?)
First is the power supply - we need both 5V and 12V. We tried sourcing split 5/12V supplies but were not successful. so instead we can have a 12V power plug and a 5V ~3A buck converter based on the TPS563201 (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/texas-instruments/TPS563201DDCT/5813458). we've also got a TPS259540 12V OVP chip (https://www.digikey.com/en/products/base-product/texas-instruments/296/TPS259540/28780) to make sure the 12V power supply doesn't get swapped with a 15V by accident. USB C can be used when no 12V is needed.
An RP2040 does all the heavy lifting for floppy interfacing. There's a 16M onboard flash plus an optional MicroSD card, so you can save raw disk flux dumps or 1:1 images. We tossed a 1.3" color TFT that might be useful for status updates. Also, we'd like to enable the ability to do off-line archiving - no computer is needed, and a display is essential.
Right now, we only have standard 34-pin IDC and 26-pin 'laptop' floppy pinouts. But we might look at adding disk ][ as well, since we got some Apple disk reading working. Since we have some silksreen room - the PCB is floppy disk sized but tbh we don't need that much space - we added some adorable floppsy bunny art.
