It seems the team at Adafruit is nowhere near short on ideas as their latest blog posts follow the creation of an impressive open-source floppy project using our favorite microcontroller—the Raspberry Pi Pico. This project makes it possible to read and write data to floppy disks.
Development started with a Feather M4 board but moved to the Pink RP2040 Feather before producing success using the Pico.
The demo video shows a breakdown of the wiring, where we can see a neat row of cables connected to the GPIO on the Pico with gaps for ground pads. The GPIO is wired directly to a Samsung SFD-321B floppy drive.
In a final demonstration, we can see Lady Ada reading a floppy disk by connecting it to the drive and interfacing using their custom controller interface. According to the team, the new floppy controller support will come to CircuitPython.
To get a closer look at the project, check out the official Adafruit Floppy project page at GitHub and watch the demonstration videos on YouTube to see it in action.
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Ash Hill is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware with a wealth of experience in the hobby electronics, 3D printing and PCs. She manages the Pi projects of the month and much of our daily Raspberry Pi reporting while also finding the best coupons and deals on all tech.