Floppy Autoloader

I had thousands of old floppy disks to read, and it would have taken
forever to process them all by hand..

This is the result, a Copypro CP-2000 wired to an arduino, a motor controller, and a kryoflux. Will automatically work its way through a hundred or so disks at a time..

For more info.. http://dwellertech.blogspot.com

• Category

  Science & Technology

[David Ford]

You could improve the efficiency of this model if you have it loading the next disk while the last one is being photographed. Waiting until the previous disk has been dropped means that the disk drive is sitting completely idle during this time. That's time wasted. ;)

[DwellerTunes]

I experimented with doing it, but the netbook running it all couldn't handle streaming the data from the floppy, while transferring the jpeg from the camera. At the end of the day, the main thing was to have it read disks without me being there, a few days extra overall is nothing compared to the amount of time the disks have spent in the crates so far.. all that time was 'wasted' too ;p

With something a little more powerful than the netbook, it would be a simple enough change.

[MagikGimp]

AMIGAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!

Awesome machine, I would have thought that all those cover-disks would have been imaged and on the 'net already though. I guess each image needs to be raw as in every sector imaged, even if blank and ignoring special disk formats.

[DwellerTunes]

Not all of them were coverdisks, and although the tosec dat file for amiga coverdisks is quite extensive, and I got hundreds of matches against it, I've also got many that didn't match.. either because there have been changes to the disks (possible), or they aren't in the dat at all.. (tbc). I'll know more as I process the data.

[BobBX542]

I'm sort of confused by one thing here, why are you photgraphing the disk??

[DwellerTunes]

Because entering the name, or typing a description of each disk would mean I'd have to be there for each one.. by just taking its photo (and associating that with the data of the disk), I can do all that later, after discarding the physical disks.

[DwellerTunes]

Yep, a few people have commented on this =) Once it's had its data read, and its photo taken, I didn't engineer an elegant solution for it ;p for the concerned, all the disks survived their drop to the ground, and were replaced into their nice wooden crates with their friends so they can have group therapy and recover from the shock of actually being read.

[fudgesauce]

Did the solenoid erase the disk as it fired to drop it out of the hopper? :-)

[awesomes8wc3]

would be useful for floppy windows 95 - 30 disks!

[Dell0304]

Wow.....that's amazing.

[TheEPROM9]

One thing that would be a good improvemt is a hopper the catch and stack the disks neatly. Otherwise an excellent way of backing up disks.

[ministeroftuba]

AMIGAAAAAAAAAAA!!!

[tehpanda64100]

what is on all of these floppies?

[Sammy1Am]

This is genius! Well done!

[stavrospod]

very clever dude..nice work..

[OpticalFascism]

This is so nerdy, it's absolutely scary. Hopefully these are all cover disks/backups from years ago which are already archived in Tosec and you didn't accumulate floppy disks till 2012.

[fagerbag]

technobuffalo