The Avolites Discussion Forum

I work out of Toronto, Canada and it is becoming increasingly difficult to buy floppy disks. Future Shop is just selling off what they have in stock, not all the Depot's and G & T's carry them. Er.... how's that USB-Flash drive thing coming along? Iain

Iain,

On the assumption this in connection with the Pearl....you are going to be dissapointed...the USB on the Pearl is a device port and not a host port.

In other words - it simply wont work.

Stock up on floppy's !

Regards,

Andy

Yes I am talking about Pearls and Sapphires. Oh dear, floppy hoarding has begun

Been thinking about this. Why? Modifications are extremley common...most of us who sit behind the board took the long road there...don't see to too much of a problem to make it work in the near future....bit of solder(lead free of course), couple of jumpers....c'mon guys the metal work is there, regards, half in jest, Iain

Everything you need to know as to why you can't use the USB port with a memory stick.

http://avolitesshop.co.uk/phpBB3/viewto ... ost+device

Thank you for your comments, we do understand that there is a problem with availability of floppy disks.

I was wondering, if it would be possible for avo to build something that would effectively replace the floppy drive with a USB socket for memory sticks? Not right now, obviously, but as an eventual solution to this problem. Is the design of the desk such that you could have a different physical device to store on if a suitable electronic interface was designed?

are you trying to find me yet more work James?? !!

I'm starting to feel a little guitly for begining this

dosx wrote:I was wondering, if it would be possible for avo to build something that would effectively replace the floppy drive with a USB socket for memory sticks?

I used to have a pretend floppy that accepted a smartmedia card which transferred the data through the floppy drive to a PC. It's a bit like those pretend cassettes you can get which have magnetic heads to engage with your tape player, with a lead to plug into (say) your CD player.

Admittedly it needed a driver disk and it seemed to me to be a clever bit of hardware, but thought I'd mention it!

pscandrett wrote:I used to have a pretend floppy that accepted a smartmedia card ...

Alas, Smartmedia has become obsolete much faster than 3.5" disks - even if the gadget did work in a desk (which I doubt), you would merely substitute the difficulty of getting floppies for the difficulty of getting Smartmedia.

(If I wasn't procrastinating in here, I would be drawing the schematics for a device which needs to replace Smartmedia with another flash-card format, because of exactly this problem.)

Let's hope the new RoHS-compliant Pearl 2006 has a USB host socket which can take thumb drives...

I take your point, but I was just trying to suggest that reading/writing flash memory (of some sort) via the floppy drive might be viable with a little bit of work :-)

pscandrett wrote:I take your point, but I was just trying to suggest that reading/writing flash memory (of some sort) via the floppy drive might be viable with a little bit of work

Yes, now you say it, a drop-in 'floppy drive' replacement which had a USB thumb-drive socket it on it sounds like a relatively simple gadget which would be handy for these long-in-the-tooth embedded applications.

How many would Avo like to buy...?

willdean wrote:Yes, now you say it, a drop-in 'floppy drive' replacement which had a USB thumb-drive socket it on it sounds like a relatively simple gadget which would be handy for these long-in-the-tooth embedded applications.

Sounds oddly familiar

dosx wrote:I was wondering, if it would be possible for avo to build something that would effectively replace the floppy drive with a USB socket for memory sticks?

willdean wrote:How many would Avo like to buy...?

Do I get a share of the royalties

dosx wrote:Do I get a share of the royalties

Actually, I did go as far as talking to the people most likely to supply the USB host controller for this sort of application (Cypress).

In the course of the discussion I/we came to the conclusion that it would be much easier to support a flash card (like SD for example) rather than a thumb drive.

Even then, finessing the disk format issues so that it appeared perfectly like a floppy disk drive wouldn't be trivial. Needless to say, I haven't done anything else about it...