USB Universal Floppy Disk controller

Dwight K. Elvey wrote: ... Catweasel: $90-ish. That is its disadvantage, but it offers a lot of convenience that a $10 DSP (OK, plus $10 in random analog bits, plus $10 worth of sockets, and $xxx worth of time wirewrapping, etc). Catweasel wins this one hands down. Just plug it in. Except that it doesn't exist. A hypothetical thing has any advantage that you wish to confer on it. The catweasel design isn't open source, but I believe just about all the drivers are. There are a number of drivers for linux/amiga/others that exist, and the driver for windows is coming along. Someone else has already suffered the pain for us. My own desire that motivated me to buy a catweasel was to collect and archive information. The fact that the collection was done on a "modern" machine (there are isa and pci versions of the card) doesn't bother me at all. #2 isn't relevant -- what do you mean? Sure, some people want to tinker with HW for the sake of tinkering with HW. I have no fear of electronics but with my limited time, I get more satisfaction in other activities. I'd rather spend a few $$ and save hours of effort collecting, building, troubleshooting so that I have time to do those other things. I suspect that I'm in the majority otherwise this project would have been done already. Even the lowest level software of the catweasel is open source. So there is no advantage in this respect for the putative design. These last three itmes were the main sticking point for a number of people. The catweasel should be able to handle just about any format; it is "just" a simple matter of software yet to be written. Yet it hasn't been done for many formats. The MK3 and earlier catweasels were deficient in their ability to write hard sectored disks efficiently, but MK4 should fix that. At the HW level read and writing are both simple; writing the flux pattern in software is easier than decoding it. Reading through a lot of the postings on this thread makes me think of somebody complaining that "linux is too big, bloated, and complicated, and redhat charges for their version too. let's write our own version that will be lean and mean and available to all for free." Thinking about the design is fun and the one who actually does it will have some rewards implementing it, but for most people, the already available solution will be superior to the proposed design even if it is ever done. Spending $60 more for a finished, professionally done board might be a showstopper for some people, but futzing with the building your own will preclude a great many more.