When tinkerer Rossum needed a floppy drive for his Atari 400 computer, he decided to modernize it. Gone is the giant, clanking Atari 810 and its slow 5.25-inch floppy disks. In its place is this tiny replica of the 810 which uses a microSD card instead.
The enclosure was 3-D printed by ShapeWays, and then Rossum gave it a lick of beige enamel paint, Inside went the card reader, an LPC1114 micro controller, a 3v3 regulator and an LED. Apart from the fiddly construction work, that was the easy part.
If this was a modern computer, the whole thing would slide into a USB port. The Atari 400 uses a serial connector which ? as you can see from the photos ? is bigger than the drive itself. Rossum programmed things so that the microSD card appears to the computer as an array of up to eight floppy drives.
But that?s just gravy. I?d just be happy with a novelty card-reader that looked like a tiny floppy drive. It?s just so damned cute.
A Little Atari 810 Disk Drive [Rossum's Posterous via Laughing Squid and Photojojo]
Photos: Rossum
See Also:
Source: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/05/tiny-replica-atari-floppy-drive-uses-microsd-cards/
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