techtravels.org

inital results on error correction

While I have yet to actually implement the full-scale error correction as I want to, I did some manual tests today. I basically took a track that I was erroring out on, and swapped in 1-bit away values for the bad bytes.  In some cases, it appeared...

Latest articles

Am I reading MFM wrong?

I’m beginning to think that I don’t fully understand the signalling coming out of the drive. I understand the concepts behind MFM (I think), but the actual application to this project, I’m not so sure...

reworking my uart

Well I rewrote my recv and send uart, and with the help of my logic analyzer, I’ve tuned them up pretty good. I’m getting some transfer errors, somehow, and I think its related to buffer size. I read a disk...

video showing current progress

I posted a video to youtube a little while ago showing my progress. It’s a little long winded (surprise surprise for those who read my posts) but it shows basically the framebuffer portion of the hardware working...

Flow control

I’ve gotten away thus far without any flow control. I just started noticing that my software was locking up occasionally when reading a disk. It was locking up in the “read” portion of the code because...

Let the fun begin!@#!@#

 
Everything has arrived!  I think the first order of business is soldering this darn memory chip…. Not sure how hard this is going to be, but I’m going to give it a shot!@#

Current status updated

Current status updated I was originally going to use a Microchip PIC, but they are just too darn slow. I gave up on the idea of using the PIC as a one-chip solution, and tried to use it as just a clock generator feeding...

March 21st Status

Well, here’s where I’m at: The external amiga floppy drive is now hooked directly to my SX microcontroller.  The code within the microcontroller waits for a command.  If it get’s a “B”...

Current updates

Wow. I can’t believe its been 20 days since my last post. Man have I been slacking. School has started up again, and add a week I was away on business/pleasure and there you have it. Here’s where I’m...

data rate vs throughput

Although I’m transmitting from the Parallax SX microcontroller to the PC via USB at a data rate of 2mbps, the actual throughput is much less.  First, there is some overhead, namely start and stop bits, which is...