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...

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Finally had some luck with FPGA board

So I bought an FPGA eval board and a book on Verilog awhile back.  I made some progress learning things, and had some simple things like UARTs, writing to the LCD, and even some small VGA software(hrrrm, maybe I should...

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...

interesting results

OK, I’ve applied the “double 1’s” fix that I talked about earlier today. This definitely helped things. I think my results are quite possibly the best I’ve seen them yet. Now, my SX...

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...

losing data

I’ve been thinking more and more about how exactly I’ve been losing data. It’s alot of data. The worst case I’ve seen is about 140 bytes. This is 1120 bits, or 2240us. This is a LONG time for my...

Found another UART timing issue

Ok. A post or two back, I mentioned that I wanted to rework the receive UART because it wasn’t working perfect. I fixed that, and now it’s reliably receiving. I also mentioned that my sending uart code was...

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...

Schmitt Trigger

Welp, after talking with some smart guys on forums.parallax.com, it looks like the Schmitt Trigger feature on the SX is going to allow me to get rid of my 74HC132 that I’ve spent at least a couple hours messing...

minor success at 2:00am

well I’ve got MFM flowing from the PC drive now.  A couple of things: Pins 10 and 14, the pins I’ve been using since last night, appear to be correct. Pin 10 is the motor lead.  Dropping a corresponding SX...