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Comment by TonyTrapp | Hacker News Reader

> Following the rodeo incident, Necaise decided to finally upgrade, but not to an entirely new machine—just to a floppy-to-USB emulator. These devices cost around $275 each...

That's odd. Gotek and similar emulators should be available for a tenth of that price. There are several variations though, so it smells to me like someone is reselling a Gotek "guaranteed to work" with a specific type of machine with a large markup.

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Odd indeed. As far as I know the Gotek was invented exactly for use by embroidery machines, and the ads are everywhere. I tried entering "embroidery floppy emulator" into Google and an Amazon link for a $38 Gotek came up first (and, as we know, we can get it cheaper than that).

But of course a few lines below there's a "floppyusbemulator.com" page with a $250 "Nalbantov" drive (which are sold for $175 elsewhere, and there are probably other variantes).

I can confirm, the first time I saw one of them (many years ago, I believe probably 15 years ago, maybe more) it was in the workshop of someone who provided assistance/repair to sewing machines (and embroidery machines), from what I can remember at the time floppies and floppy drives were still in use and it was intended as an upgrade as it had less issues with dust and was more convenient to have many (up to 100) "floppy" images available.

Besides the (now common) Gotek, there are every kind of emulators/replacements for industrial machines, like, besides embroidery, CNC's, some early robots, etc., here is a site dedicated to them:

https://embeddedsw.net/EMUFDD_Floppy_Hardware_Emulator_Home....

yep, sounds like getting something for 21$ on Aliexpress (https://www.aliexpress.us/item/2251832100710868.html) and selling it for >13x more.

Happens in the SCSI emulator market as well - there is a company massively marking up SCSI emulators and praying on naive musicians. Which is fair enough given they set them up before sending them out, but it still irks my sense of fairness

You're right, I remember now seeing exactly that when researching SCSI2SD options. But the markup was never 10x.

Fair point - not 10x, just normally about 2-3x!

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