11 Jan
2023
11 Jan
'23
12:39 a.m.
On 1/10/23 15:24, Mike Katz via cctalk wrote:
I haven't seen any mention of greaseweazel types
of "flux" readers.
They read the flux changes off of the floppy and then interpret them
with a separate program.
Before the greaseweazel, and similar boards, there
were the Catweasel
controllers, which are essentially the same thing, but done in an FPGA
with an ISA interface. Even then, I kept telling people that most
microcontrollers with a capture-mode timer would do the job for a
fraction of the cost. Personally, I've been using an STM32F407 with
my own software. It produces catweasel-files and works with my own
code written for catweasel.
I probably made it overly complicated, as it uses DMA to record the
capture events. At 168MHz on a pipelined architecture, I could have
gone with polled I/O, but the deed is done.
Even before the high-integration MCUs with everything but the kitchen
sink, I was using an ATMega162 with external SRAM to do the sampling.
It's not brain surgery.
Chuck