Floppy8 – A Tiny Computer, in a Floppy Drive (2023) | Hacker News Reader

Floppy8 – A Tiny Computer, in a Floppy Drive (2023)

abe.today

171 pointsphilips47 comments

This somehow reminded me of the "Access A1200"; A complete and upgraded Amiga 1200 clone that fit in a 5.25" floppy drive bay [1]

I remember the Amiga community absolutely frothing over it a couple of decades ago (myself included). It makes me sad that I can't find any info about it anymore, except for the Soft3 page advertising used versions on the Internet Archive.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20030421150743/http://www.soft3....

It's too bad that the PCB designs and other design specs aren't available for this, and for many other no-longer-produced electronic things as well.

Fascinating, I’d not heard of this. I did find a bit more info [1]. Seems it was used as a kiosk multimedia playback system.

[1] https://amiga.resource.cx/mod/access.html

There was the Ross SPARCPlug[1] that was a whole Sun SPARCStation 20 clone the size of a 5.25" hard drive. Now you can have your Unix workstation and Windows machine in one box![2]

[1] http://www.bitsavers.org/components/rossTechnology/Ross_SPAR... [2] It was a way better idea than reality, mostly because M-bus CPUs ran really, really hot so the whole thing was kinda flaky and loud.

SPARCPlug is such a great name for it too!

Ampro, who would go on to create the PC104 SBC motherboard standard, got their start with a cp/m computer that would mount right on a 5 1/4" floppy drive: https://oldcomputers.net/ampro-little-board.html

Oh hey that’s my Floppy8! Never woken up to find my stuff on HN before! So cool!

I actually just released a video earlier this week about the progression of my SD card based cartridges[0] which started with the floppy cartridges for this. If you like the Floppy8 you’ll probably enjoy seeing the dozen iterations I went through after this blog post haha

I’m mostly a YouTuber not a blogger so I have a bunch of other projects on my channel[1] in a similar vein which you might enjoy as well.

[0] https://youtu.be/END_PVp3Eds

[1] https://youtube.com/@abetoday

Which temperature-sensitive filament did you use for the thermal test?

It was the AMOLEN Color Change PLA. Sadly I just took a quick look and don’t see it available anymore, but I might be missing it.

Thanks, I did a quick search and I only saw TPU options.

Heh, was just about to post that this design ended up having issues with chafing between the sdcard read and the sdcard and that the new design (for the reader part at least) addressed this. I love the new version and have been contemplating making one myself. Very nice videos and description, so thank you for sharing your projects

Haha yes, I'm still not used to people knowing so much about my projects, thank you for watching!

How did you find the servo to eject the cartridge? You mentioned occasional jams, is that because of the style of cog, or the lack of pressure from the servo? I wonder if there is some tensing or alignment issues from the plastic cog..

I wonder if metal would better.

It actually never jammed I was just afraid that it would! It's just a generic micro servo, I think from Adafruit probably.

Ohh I mis-read that then. Thanks for the reference. I'm just getting into electronics myself and that site looks great.

You are absolutely insane. Bravo!

Looks like Germany Navy[0] want to some how emulate floppy disks. Maybe the you can make a living out of that.

[0]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/07/german-navy-still-us...

Tangentially, if you have some old external USB CD/DVD box collecting dust, especially those with their internal power supply but all will fit, don't throw them away as they are about the perfect case for fitting a SBC inside with the CD drive removed and swapped with a multi card reader+USB ports panel. Bringing out HDMI from the rear in a clean way can be achieved by using "HDMI panel socket"s that can be purchased online for cheap.

I thought it was going to be a computer in a floppy disk that spoofed data into the read heads. I wonder if you could emulate a floppy disk, and if that would let you cheat orders of magnitude more data into a "disk".

They did it for cassette tapes, so it should be possible.

Adding weight to the controller stands out to me. On one side, the fact materials and electronics are so small and light is awesome, on the other it might be worth making "bespoke" electronics like this in heavier and stronger materials like wood or resin. I get that the retro feel demands cheap plastic, but going forward, if we are going to DIY computers like this, we can make them to last a lot longer than the commercial world would consider.

Nice work. Good perseverance. I like the idea and the way it came about. Some of the design aspects are similar to a project I am working on that i hope to finish before the end of this year. Its a mainboard on the wall for data recovery with custom made housing brackets for usb ports and switches. Im hoping to add a small secondary display to pipe command output to so I can monitor at a glance my recovery jobs.

I'm kinda sad he didn't go for regular size SD cards (maybe with microSD through an adapter). With more sparsely spaced contacts it should be easy to make your own adapter which doesn't get torn apart when you eject, and it would look slightly more like those PCB-based cartridges IMO.

Still a cool project! I'd love to make something like that.

This thing is beautiful. Makes me want to do something like this but I dont have the time or skill or a 3d printer

Love the build. I think the printer you used was genius in terms of how it gives a super retro look to the label.

When I saw how you had to cut the edges I thought I would share that When printing my own custom labels or stickers, I use a local print shop that has a vinyl printer+cutter. Im not sure what media they would use to make this cool retro look, as I order the durable vinyl for my applications so far. (such as custom bottle labels for a friends birthday). No glue is needed and I have saved a fair amount of cash by using their printer instead of buying one.

Home versions of these printer+cutters start at around 300-400 bucks. Thanks for posting your build, I have found it very inspirational.

I am reminded of Rana systems, who used to make disc drives for Apple II Systems. They announced the new product that was basically an IBM PC built into a disk drive so you could run IBM PC applications on your Apple. They sank the company trying to make it work. At least that’s how I remember it through the fog of memory. The 80s were a while ago.

So what’s the most data we can put on a floppy now?

If you mean the shell of a floppy you can fit about 50 microsd cards in there with 1.5TB each.

No I mean spinning rust on plastic.

Laser-guided SuperDisks got up to 240MB, and Zip drives with floating heads got up to 750MB. At that point you're basically operating a hard drive without a dust seal, so it would be pretty hard to go much further even with modern tech.

But if you did figure it out, let's use the data density of LTO. If we estimate a 3.5" floppy as 50 square centimeters, then that's the same area as 40 centimeters of tape, which fits about 7GB on LTO-9. A bit more if you can get double-sided writes to happen and not interfere with each other. Less if you have the dead zones of an actual floppy.

A ~5GB floppy disk actually sounds like a pretty useful thing at first, until you realize that you can get USB thumb drives that size almost for free these days. At least the floppy disk would probably be a reasonably secure way to store data for decades, unlike the flash drive, as long as the disk (and the drive) were made with 1980s/early-90s quality and not late-1990s/2000s quality (floppy disks in the 80s were supremely reliable, whereas ones in the late 90s were hilariously unreliable).

If you took some modern flash and ran it at half capacity by using 2 bits per cell, gratuitous error correction, and lots of spare blocks, I would expect it to store data for decades.

But if we're positing reasonably-priced drives with that kind of tech, I would rather it actually be a tape drive. Let me get a 9TB tape for $40 or less, even if it's only useful for backups and video files.

The lack of random access on tape is pretty bad. You have a lot more coping mechanisms for that these days but it’s still rough.

It's slow but it's actually price-effective.

A 7GB floppy gets crushed by a handful of $3 flash drives.

Beyond about ~100 MB historically speaking the industry shifted towards magneto-optical systems. They do store data magnetically - but they're read with lasers, since tracking and physical wear and tear from a head in contact with the medium, were the major limitations when it came to increasing floppy disk density. There's a neat effect where certain kinds of crystals vary their reflectivity depending on magnetization, which is how they work.

Sony's MiniDisc was an example but in the '80s and '90s there were many competing variations.

I looked it up later yesterday, and it looks like after the Jaz drive we tried out a design where the read heads were built into the cartridge. Presumably to avoid the problem with the relative size of dust versus the flying height and of a byte on disk.

But we also started seeing triple platter or sometimes more in hard drives, making the gap even bigger. 1.8” hard drives in a hot swap slot would work pretty well for something like the device in this article.

If you want a nice chunky insert that may or may not have a small hard drive inside, it sounds like you're describing CompactFlash.

I would take a future bet that the moment we have something that can replace flash memory we will drop it like a hot rock and then tease each other about how dumb we were to entrust real data to being stored on it.

It's not like we have a choice. We don't have any robust storage technologies for normal use, so it's flash and hard drives being unreliable versus not storing data at all. Tape is the best shot for large medium-term archives, but I bet if you baby flash with a small number of writes and cool storage temperatures it'll also last 20-30 years.

2GB https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaz_drive

Jaz drives have rigid platters, not plastic film.

Even if you accept that, multiple platters is definitely cheating and each one is only 1GB.

Really nice write up and amazing skillset!

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these in a Zip drive

That's a 5.25" inch floppy drive.. not a real floppy drive, to me.

90's kid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk

Edit: Thanks @alberto_ol, link fixed.

I think there is a missing "." in your link. The correct link should be:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk

I'm not sure what you're getting at here. The OP is a 3.5 inch floppy drive, I don't think I ever saw a 5.25 inch drive for Amiga.

I remember some people used to day 3.5 inch floppies "aren't floppy", but it was just the case that was more rigid than the prior formats; the actual rust-on-plastic was still "floppy", opposed to a hard drive platter that is rigid.

Yeah, you are correct! I was confused, somehow I thought it was a 5-1/4" drive until I came back to it this morning.

I'm glad this has been downvoted, I even appreciate if it got flagged to death, because it was a dumb mistake. Please accept my apologies for the noise.

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