10 Jun
2013
10 Jun
'13
8:48 p.m.
Good morning,
I don't think we ever came to a conclusion. ;-)
Ah, ok... I understand :-)
I think of a little (!!) board (2*3cm) that can be taped to the RK05's card
cage. You solder 5 AWG30 wires to it. You'll need WireWrap tool and unwrapping
tool to do the job in 3 minutes.
- Two wires are wrapped to 5V supply and ground.
- One wire is wrapped to the index pulse (the thing that tells about the double
slot)
- The connection between sector pulse output and the bus interface is unwrapped
- One wire is wrapped to the now open sector pulse output of the RK05 electronics.
- One wire is wrapped to the sector pulse line on the bus connection.
So the only modification to the drive would be unwrapping of one backplane
connection. I find this acceptable.
The board itself will have a jumper where you can select the number of desired
virtual sectors. The controller on the board will count the pack sectors. If it
matches the desired count, it will just pass along the sector pulse with some
few ns delay which won't be seen by anything in the system. If the desired
sector count does not match, the virtual thing applies.
The final use case would be: You jumper your drive according to the system you
want to connect it to. And then use any (!!!) pack. Wouldn't that be nice?
I will do the PCB design tomorrow. This will be a new product in my
will-be-famous webshop!
This has been discussed at length among us DEC folks
here in the SF Bay area.
And with which conclusion? Yes, as the index slots are fairly easy to identify.
With that and knowing the original number of slots
it should be easy (and fairly accurate) to regenerate the number of slots (sectors) that
you wanted.
As far as I remember the drive outputs a sector 0 pulse and index
pulses.
So, new
question: Would there be any interest in a little circuit that can be added to any RK05
drive?
What we talked about was doing something so that the drive can be turned back to original
condition
fairly easily.
>> As an aside, I'm in about the same boat.
I have 4 16-sector packs and 200-300 12 sector packs.
> Hundreds and only four? I have about 15 16-sector packs. And less 12 sector packs.
But as I wrote - there's 12-sector pack supply...
>
Yea, it's one of those things and I'm happy to
have the 16 sector packs that I do. I also have a number of
the "red" alignment packs.
But the alignment pack are 12 sectors afaik
:-P Haha! What a blasphemic thougt
just to format them :-)
I've been disassembling, cleaning, inspecting the
12 sector packs and I've had some fallout (~5-10%) but those
have been the nasty/dirty packs (about 1/2 of them). The others are clean so I suspect
the fallout rate on those
will be much lower.
I have seen very few bad packs yet. But some don't work. I
seen packs that just
keep crashing. And packs that look great, don't crash, but have errors.
I also have moved a disk from a 12 sector pack to a 16 sector pack. Centering is
difficult. If not centered properly the drive will rattle uncomfortably.
Kind regards
Philipp