This floppy disk archiver runs on a Raspberry Pi
Graham Hooley converted an old floppy disk duplicator into an archiving machine that makes light work of preserving old files, David Crookes discovers in issue 150 of our official magazine.
As many computer archivists will confirm, floppy disks don’t last forever. Although some will fare better than others, magnetic media generally degrades over time, and disks can also fail due to dirt and dust if they’re not stored properly. It’s vital to archive them to a different media format as soon as possible to retain data. The trouble is that archiving can be a cumbersome, long-winded process — unless you have an innovative device to hand.
Maker and developer Graham Hooley has created such a tool — a machine that allows a bunch of 3.5-inch floppies to be stacked and automatically read one at a time. The device uses parts from existing disk duplicators as well as a Raspberry Pi 3. It allows the disk images to be backed up to a USB drive. Not only that, but a Raspberry Pi Camera Module 2 snaps photos of the disks, and these get archived as well. Not bad for a project that came about following a fortunate sequence of events.
“I’m a member of a maker space called Berlin Creators and we have a WhatsApp group chat,” Graham explains. “One of the members said his brother had two 3.5-inch floppy disk duplicator machines in his cellar and he wanted to know if anyone wanted them before they ended up in waste recycling. I said I would take them, so he dropped them off at the maker space during our next Amiga meet-up. I had no idea what to do with them at first but, about two weeks later, I had a eureka moment.”
Grease is the word
Graham had been testing the units and he was able to get one running and accepting serial commands from his PC. He then recalled seeing a video on YouTube by Shelby Jeuden [also known as Tech Tangents] about the Kryoflux and Greaseweazle solutions for preserving software on floppy disk.
Kryoflux, developed by the Software Preservation Society, and Greaseweazle, created by Keir Fraser, are small devices that sit between a floppy drive and a computer, allowing information to be harvested from disks. Using software, they can extract the raw flux transitions from a drive and allow binary image files to be built, preserving files that can then be read via emulators.
“I thought if I connected the floppy disk drive I’d been given to a Greaseweazle, I could load the disk using the serial interface, capture the image, eject, and repeat,” Graham says. “I then decided to hook up a USB-to-serial adapter because most PCs don’t have serial interfaces any more, but that didn’t work. I quickly realised that the interface on the controller board was (true) RS232, not TTL RS232, so I added a level shifter and that worked.”
Suddenly, Graham found that his setup could make light work of his 800-strong collection of disks for the Commodore Amiga, a computer he used for many years in the 1990s and 2000s. Having fixed a faulty used 16-bit A500 and progressed to a 32-bit A1200, his disk collection had grown stronger recently. “I’ve been collecting Amigas for the past five years and many have come with floppy disks,” he says. Finding a way to archive them has, therefore, been timely.
Flux capacity
Graham decided to use a Raspberry Pi computer for a couple of reasons. “I have several of them because I’m a big fan and I had a spare Raspberry Pi 3,” he says. He also found that the build was rather straightforward once everything was in place. “It uses a Python script to control the Greaseweazle mechanism via its serial port by sending ‘I’ for Insert,” he explains. “It then returns ‘X’ if successful and ‘E’ for an error.”
If the script receives ‘X’ then it uses the Greaseweazle software to read the disk, returning ‘0’ when done. “The disk is then ejected by sending ‘A’ for Accept on the serial port,” Graham adds. “At this point, a photo of the disk label is taken and stored with the same file name as the disk image, adding ‘.jpg’. The camera came later in the design process. I wanted a way to identify which disk image belonged to which floppy disk, otherwise I would have to open each disk image to see what was on the disk.”
Wide scope
Since Graham’s device can read any 3.5-inch floppy disks supported by the Greaseweazle, archiving is not restricted to the Amiga. In fact, since Graham repurposed a 37-way D-type connector on the back of the disk duplicator unit to allow 5.25-inch and 8-inch drives to be connected, it is compatible with pretty much any retro machine you can think of.
Graham is now busily going through the archived disks in the hope of finding some treasure among his collection — there’s always a chance that disks obtained from others contain long-forgotten files. “I have not found anything rare or sought-after at the moment, but I am checking the image files and there is still lots to do,” he says.
You can read the full article in issue 150 of The MagPi.
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