Last edited by elfprince13 on 23 Sep 2013 11:44:16 am; edited 1 time in total
Hi 1980sand512k, I think we met and spoke about your Apple 800k floppy drive at Maker Faire today?
Do you know what the connector standard on your drive is? IDC-34 drives are the standard that's been around for a while, and if I understand correctly, should greatly simplify the control of the relevant motors in the drive. The link here: http://www.cemetech.net/projects/item.php?id=38 shows the wiring schematics for controlling a drive with such a connector.
KermM can probably tell you more about the "tuning" process.
Welcome to Cemetech, 1980sand512k! An Arduino and that Sony floppy drive should be all that you need to play some music, as the Arduino is great at PWM through some of its GPIO lines. In fact, with the Arduino, you could find yourself more than one floppy drive and play polyphonic music.
I've done a little research. Your drive probably has an IDC-20 connector, and a very different pinout than a standard PC floppy drive. It's a more sophisticated drive, designed for higher-density data than the 800K PC floppies of the day, and uses a variable speed spinning motor to achieve linearly uniform data distribution, rather than angularly linear as is the case in most other floppy technology.
You can find a pinout here: http://support.apple.com/kb/TA48050?viewlocale=en_US (and in a couple other places) for the connector used for external drives, but I can't find any information on the command protocols. I'm also not sure how the DB-19 connector for external drives maps to the IDC-20 internal connector, but obviously one line is not used. I did find schematics here for building an 800K floppy drive emulator to load disk images from SD cards onto old Macs, so obviously someone has figured it out. He also supports both the DB-19 and IDC-20 connectors, so I think that's your best bet. http://www.bigmessowires.com/macintosh-floppy-emu/
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The "Inside Macintosh" series probably has the necessary documentation.
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