 I have a new toy. This is the Flux Engine. Let me clarify that. This is the Flux Engine. This is a open source USB floppy drive controller capable of reading and writing nearly any format of floppy disk. You just need some floppy drives to plug it into, preferably inside a repurposed Hewlett-Packard fall height optical drive bay. Let me demonstrate. This is a cheap Chromebook I use for development. Don't judge me. I power up the drive enclosure and plug it in by USB. This is a floppy disk from 1991. It contains some BBC micro-programs that as a teenager I sent to a computer magazine. They rejected them. I'm not bitter. It's 28 years old. It reads fine. This disk is Acorn DFS format, which is single-sided 200 kilobytes using FM encoding and the IBM record scheme. I end up with a clean disk image ready for my favourite emulator. How about something a little more challenging? This is a Brother Word processor typewriter from the early 1990s. It will let you save documents onto disk. Can Flux Engine read these? Of course it can. Brother disks are weird. They use a custom GCR encoding, 256 bytes per sector. They don't even spin at the same speed as modern drives do, and PCs won't touch them. But Flux Engine can read and write them with no problems. Let me show you one close-up. This is a Cypress Psoc 5 development board, $10 plus shipping. To construct a Flux Engine, you need one of these and one of these. A IDC-34 floppy disk connector, completely standard. Simply solder the connector onto the board like this. No other hardware is required. If you don't have a suitable connector, you can make do with a row of 17 header pins. The prototype in the box I just showed you used exactly that. Once done, you plug this end into a PC for programming and the other end in to actually use it. Full instructions are on the website. Right now it's all very much a work in progress. The Flux Engine currently supports Acorn, Brother, Amiga, Atari ST, Apple Macintosh and, of course, IBM PC formats of disk. If anyone has any samples of weird disk formats you want to send me, I can add more. It'll also read Cryoflux dumps, so if you have any of those too, please let me know. It is capable of writing to disks, but this is harder to test as I need an actual hardware. So right now only Brother Word processors work. If anyone tries one of these, please get in touch. I would love to hear from you. If you particularly want to hear about bugs, I can't fix bugs if I don't know about them. Incidentally, I did think of demoing reading a PC disk, but they are really dull, so I didn't.