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

more SX to PC tests

Although I think I’ve long had this working good, I did some more tests just to verify. Latest numbers: Each cycle is about 15.8us, 2us per bit, 8 bits, this sounds fine. This does confirm, however, what I...

timing movie

I have uploaded a movie showing 30 seconds of input signal vs detected result. I checked this frame by frame and I didn’t find a single error. I still can’t figure out why I have output errors. Maybe you can...

merging USB receive

Well, I’ve managed to merge the USB receive portion into the main program that reads and processes tracks.  This means I no longer need an external program to receive the data, to write it to a file, to read the...

Parallel port access in win 2k

Accessing the parallel port directly under Windows 2000, XP, etc in a standard user app is not natively available, but there are a couple different solutions available. The free one I use is called WinIo, and it is...

vacation reading

While I’m on vacation this week, I’m reading a book about making your own circuit boards using Cadsoft’s Eagle. Eagle is a schematic capture and board layout program that seems pretty popular and...

current code plus recent progress

Although its ugly, the new code is here. This shows the entire ISR in assembly now. I do like it much better. Tonight I happened to transfer a track that has a good sector. The sector header passed checksum, as did the...

test results of my output file

What I wanted to know was if the output file that I collected via my setup was actually correct. I was confident that since I was getting 4489’s consistently, that I have to be at least part way...

java and portability

While I have some experience with Java, I’ve never tried to run my stuff cross-platform. Never a real need. While most of the Java stuff has yet to be written, I took some basic serial code and GUI stuff, and...

current results

Now that I have a portion of Marco’s old code implemented, I’ve run an output file from my SX through it. It’s one whole track from a capture of a DiskMonTools. It’s almost 14k long, which sounds...

java software progress

This morning I added MFM decoding, header and data checksumming and checking to the java client.  I was somewhat worried about doing the MFM decoding, but it was all worry for nothing. Once you wrap your head around how...