Hi all,

its now quite a while that I released something… But I wasn’t lazy in that time. I got amazed by the possibilities of bit cell exact disk capture as presented by the Cyclone20 and KryoFlux… and so I wanted to build my own disk capture unit.

I recently bought a BeagleBoard clone board called IGEPv2 and soon the idea emerged to build a stand-alone disk copy unit based on this board. In the end I’d like to have a box with a floppy drive and a beagle with sd card slot. I can insert a disk to capture and then press a single button to create a bit cell exact and bit rot resistent disk image version on the SD card…

I started experimenting with the AT91SAM7x CPU used as a sampler device in the Cylcone20 and KryoFlux projects. Since no public firmware exists I wrote my own version from scratch. I don’t use USB for data transfer but an SPI channel between SAM7x and the Beagle. The beagleboard runs Poky/Angstrom Linux and therefore the host capture tool is written in C using spidev in user space. All processing tools working on the sampled bit cells are written as Python scripts.

Now everything works really well, i.e. I can capture a disk trackwise and store the samples reliably. Furthermore the conversion tools now can extract a bit stream, decode AmigaDOS blocks and derive an ADF Disk Image in the end. Its by far not a finished project but its in a state you can already work and experiment with…

If you got interested then head over to my DiskFreezerX project page