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.
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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.
