Amiga DrawBridge and Greaseweazle

I started this project, completely fascinated by the recent articles written by Rob Smith for Amiga Addict magazine, detailing his solution for reading and writing Amiga floppy disks using an Arduino. I decided to look into low-cost implementation of his solution, as well as look into the other well known solution - the Greaseweazle. While there are certainly more professional options available, KryoFlux comes to mind, I like the idea of having low-cost solutions available - making personal disk backups a fun little diversion as opposed to a museum-grade investment.

• 1> Amiga DrawBridge
  • 1.1> Modules
• 2> Greaseweazle
  • 2.1> Modules

1> Amiga DrawBridge

Rob Smith called his solution the Arduino Amiga Floppy Disk Reader/Writer, colloquially known as the DrawBridge. Completely open solution created with the Arduino as a starting point, all of the information that you'd need to build it can be found on his homepage. You don't need more than few relatively common modules and a ton of wires to make it work, but mainly because I enjoy drawing things, as well as having an inherent distrust of the kind of cheap Dupont cables I keep buying - I made a PCB for soldering the components to instead.

One of the more interesting features of the DrawBridge is that he has put together a modified version of WinUAE, allowing the emulator to work directly with your physical disks! He later ported the feature so that the same can be done with the Greaseweazle, pretty impressive stuff.

1.1> Modules

For the technical details as well as information regarding the modules included by this specific github project, consult the table below - follow the documentation links for build instructions, BOM and anything else of that sort. Faceplates and any backplates listed are mainly decorative, allowing you to put together something similar to a case without actually requiring a 3d-printer.

Module	Required	Documentation	Order
Amiga DrawBridge	Yes	Documentation, Firmware	PCBWay
Amiga DrawBridge FA1	Faceplate	Documentation	PCBWay
Amiga DrawBridge FA2	Faceplate	Documentation	PCBWay
Amiga DrawBridge BA1	Backplate	Documentation	PCBWay

2> Greaseweazle

The Greaseweazle is another well known low-cost solution for working with physical floppy disks, having been created by Keir Fraser (also the creator of Flash Floppy firmware for Gotek drives). The difference from the DrawBridge is that instead of attempting to work with a specific disk format, it instead attempts to read the raw magnetic flux layer from the disks - allowing even damaged or disks of unknown origin to be imaged.

2.1> Modules

For the technical details as well as information regarding the modules included by this specific github project, consult the table below - follow the documentation links for build instructions, BOM and anything else of that sort. Faceplates and any backplates listed are mainly decorative, allowing you to put together something similar to a case without actually requiring a 3d-printer.

Module	Required	Documentation	Order
Greaseweazle	Yes	Documentation, Firmware, Getting started	PCBWay
Greaseweazle FA1	Faceplate	Documentation	PCBWay
Greaseweazle BA1	Faceplate	Documentation	PCBWay