Recently made up my third RobSmith's DrawBridge project but this time decided to go a different route. I decided instead of using a standard 3.5" PC FDD I would connect the Arduino to a 23 pin socket for connection to a standard Amiga external drive. Sadly Ive been having great difficulties getting this to work by from what I can tell, the flip-flop circuit inside the drive.
I have been in contact with RobSmith and from what I can tell, im the first to try this out.
Basically I have routed all connections to the 23 pin connector. I have +5V and +12V going to the drive. Using the DrawBridge windows software it always errors out during the diagnostics stopping with an error when it tries to test the WriteProtect line. From what I can tell, the drive is not being selected correctly.
From an Arduino serial terminal I have success moving the head, the track sensor reads correctly but I can not get the motor to start and obviously cannot then read or write data or detect writeprotect etc.
My question is, is there a way without modifying the drive to have the drive react like an internal drive without the motor latching mode that the flip-flop provides? If not Im probably going to have to modify the Arduino code for the DrawBridge is my guess?
Very occasionally I can turn power on/off to the drive and sometimes the flipflop must latch motor on because I dont have the drive reset line connected. When this happens I can indeed read data from the drive and the write protect does actually work then. Im not the best coder so modifying the Arduino code to account for the latching motor on signal would be difficult to do.
Any help, tips or ideas would be greatly appreciated. Cheers
