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...

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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...

out of the country!

I just left Amsterdam, and now am spending some time in Brussels.
I have some preliminary photos up in the gallery.

Floppy project is still on my mind!
 

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...

updates

I originally thought that the SX might be sending the data too fast for the PC to handle. As my last post mentioned, one full cycle is 12us, but who knows if this is during a disk-write, going into the cache, etc. I...

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...

review of timing details

I set up a couple more hardware flags on my software so I could see things like, edge detections vs rollover detections vs PC transmissions, etc. It all looks perfect to me. I took maybe a dozen different samples...

basic schematic

I put up a rough schematic of my design.  It’s not perfect, and will be updated in the near future, but if you are interested.
Click the image below for a full size image.

too many variables

I think that’s really the problem I’ve been facing with this floppy project. Trials and tribulations indeed. Or at least trial and error, with stress on the error part. There are probably less than half-a...

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...