Converting all my Amiga Disks..

The time has come to finally get rid of all my 3.5"DD floppy disks.. they are taking up valuable cupboard space that I need back for shinier and more recent items. I know that some of them have data on that I'd like to keep, source I wrote back in the late 80's / early 90's.. midi files, soundtracker / octamed tunes.. The problem is figuring out which disks..

You see since I stopped using the Amiga regularly (this sounds like a meeting of Amiga Anonymous, of which I'm sure there'd be many many members ;p).. I've "looked after" the disks by storing them in some large wooden crates, I've got 6 of these crates, each holding around 500 disks, plus a couple of large shoe boxes, and an old 80 capacity smoked plastic lid box, each crammed as full as can be.. all in all there's somewhere around 5000 disks.. That's rather a lot to go through.. especially when you didn't label many of them appropriately..

Woodworking for the Software Engineer...

So.. I've been a bit busy recently, and the fun technical progress with arduinos, maples, serial FRAMs, and floppy autoloaders has been somewhat on hold.. plus there was that whole christmas thing ;p

What have I been up to ?

Then you put it back together..

It's done.. =)

I've completed reassembly of the CopyPro CP2000, with a new mainboard, consisting of a chunk of MDF, with an Arduino, Motor Board, Stripboard & breadboard, and Kryoflux attached to it..

All in the same space of the original..

First, you take it apart...

Well.. my little project to read in my entire Amiga Floppy archive took another step forward, when an Ebay search found a 'CopyPro 2000'.. leading to the purchase of a bunch of related bits & bobs..

So now I'm waiting on a motor controller, some connectors, stripboard, I've been slightly busy attempting to read datasheets..

What is a CopyPro 2000? why is it useful? Read on..

Arduinos Floppy Drives, and Maples..

Time for some serious geekery documenting =)

This tale starts with my other half getting intrigued by an arduino.. and picking up an Uno, with a whole exploratory box full of parts, and little projects to build. Then shortly after that, getting an arduino nano, and an ethernet module, with the aim of solving our garage door opening problems..

This led to me to start looking at arduinos & MIDI, and lcd's, and thus I ended up with an arduino Mega. Then I got a little sidetracked, and started looking at how to read floppy disks, and things just kinda spiralled from there..

Busy busy busy

Well.. life presses on.. and somehow I find it's almost a month since I posted here last..

I mean.. just how? it's not like I visited another planet, or entered a tech free lifestyle growing corn & making bread.. is it?

Well, here's some of what I've been up to..

Compressing Postcodes..

The UK has postcodes, which are of a similar purpose to zip codes in the US. You put a postcode, and a house number on an envelope, and in theory that's pretty much all that's needed to get the letter to the destination.

I've never really put much thought into how they were constructed, until I met a stack of data that was indexed using postcodes as the lookup, very handy, but it was causing the data size to exceed a limit which meant I couldn't embed the data into a blog post ;-)

I went hunting, and found a document explaining the structure here. I ran a quick scan over my data, discovering I had 121 postcode areas present in my list, some 129 sub bits of them, and some 4000 or so last bits =) Eg, PO1 3AX, PO being what I'd call an area, 1 being the sub bit, and 3AX being the last bit.

I started playing around a bit and here's what I ended up with...