DiskFreezerX going public

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

1 thought on “DiskFreezerX going public

  1. Morgen Chris, I know this is a very late reaction but I can’t resist to add, your SD card (and other flash-based storage) is more susceptible to bit rot as the years pass than good old low density floppy disks. Obviously you don’t intend to keep your precious disk image archive on an SD card, and will only use the card for convenient data transfers/transport, but still it is a point to be kept in mind.

    Happy New Year!

    Istvan Belanszky

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