techtravels.org

inital results on error correction

While I have yet to actually implement the full-scale error correction as I want to, I did some manual tests today. I basically took a track that I was erroring out on, and swapped in 1-bit away values for the bad bytes.  In some cases, it appeared...

Latest articles

Current status updated

Current status updated I was originally going to use a Microchip PIC, but they are just too darn slow. I gave up on the idea of using the PIC as a one-chip solution, and tried to use it as just a clock generator feeding...

Parallax USR2SER

So I got my Parallax USR2SER in yesterday. Man is this thing tiny!! About the same width of my finger, and about 1/3 the length! And its mostly surface mount stuff….. It works like a charm. Easy installation, I...

Current updates

Wow. I can’t believe its been 20 days since my last post. Man have I been slacking. School has started up again, and add a week I was away on business/pleasure and there you have it. Here’s where I’m...

amiga floppy project activity

I don’t know how interesting this is, but I thought I’d throw it up anyways. I exported the posts and comments tables from the mysql database, imported into Excel, and then created an activity graph of the...

updates with FRAM access

My initial attempts to write to the FRAM used SX/B commands like SHIFTIN and SHIFTOUT. These operated at a slow rate of about 83kbits/s. It did work and functioned as a good test of the hardware setup. Now that...

video showing current progress

I posted a video to youtube a little while ago showing my progress. It’s a little long winded (surprise surprise for those who read my posts) but it shows basically the framebuffer portion of the hardware working...

Good news good news. First perfect .adf

Good news indeed! I’ve managed to create a fully functioning .ADF from a floppy.  I matched the output from my hardware/software combination with a “transdisk” output, and it matches exactly. I used...

found bug last night

With this new FPGA solution, certain tracks would result in what I call a “short read.”  A short read is any received track that contains less than 28,125 delta T’s, aka pulse times.  Given a certain...

great performance increases

Today I’ve worked on optimizing the performance of the AFP reader and have made great strides. My original track times were nearly 475ms. This was 300ms reading the actual disk, 125ms transferring, and process...