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

Good news. Floppy now under SX control

OK, so I finally bit the bullet and have the floppy drive under direct SX control. I have my amiga power supply, which is a modified PC supply with harddrive leads powering the drive directly with +12v and +5v.  I also...

added version control and another command

I’ve really wanted version control for a long time.  The ability to go back and undo diverse changes across sessions is valuable.  I also feel a little safer and don’t mind doing semi-destructive edits...

reading problems

I hate leaving projects for awhile.  Any more than a few days, and you lose the focus, you lose the insight, and remembering exactly where you left off can be a pain in the butt. This time, I’ve come back to a...

first real world tests

Well I tried to read about 70 disks in via my project tonight. I had mixed results. First, the Teac loves HD media but doesn’t fare as well with LD media. The Samsung hates HD media, but does very well with LD...

Latest attempt

Tim mentioned something in the last post regarding SYNC which really had me thinking about how to SYNC the data coming in the drive with the data going to the UART of the USB2SER converter. Then I was thinking, now that...

adding more commands

Now that I *think* I’ve got a handle on the reading portion, I’ve been adding a couple more commands. I added support so that the SX knows what cylinder number it is on.  The F and B commands increase and...

switched servers

Well, I’ve switched servers at my webhost.  I’ve updated WordPress and Gallery.  No major changes, but both of these updates fix security vunerabilities.  I’ve been wrapped around this for a...

Of timing, and general progress

I’ve determined that programming is like whack-a-mole(only took me 15 years to figure this out!) Fix one problem, and another one that already works stops working. This is what happened to me yesterday. My ISR...

PC xfer still not working

Well I completely rewrote the code. And surprisingly, it looks pretty similar to what I did before. I moved the store/transfer routine out of (being called from) the ISR to the main loop. As soon as the ISR detects a...

more followup winIO vs inpoup32

I did a little informal write test. A small tight loop that simply raises pin 1 and then lowers it again. Both in as little code as possible, as clean as possible. WINIO: Total time to raise and lower again, 2.5us...