Quote Originally Posted by sherial View Post
My question is:
How much trouble would it be to have the PIC read its info from a standard Floppy drive? Therefore, you could copy your Programs to floppy disk and use the disk to flash the Microcontroller (PIC).
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I'm sure you can do it !
Sony floppy controller can be program with 8bits micro controller for sure !
we (me and my school mate) did that 20 years ago
with a Motorola 6809 !
I was awesome to for the first time be able to format a track, and format the complete disk, then read at file and track from on disk and write it to another one!
You will learn alot about uP, and interface with mechanical interface, some magnetic stuff too, and old file structure, track, sector, TOC, etc etc
)
Here some hints :
we seach for 1 complete night why suddenly we were not able to format one track again ...
check info on pre - compensation when reading/writing
P
Take a Pic with DMA channels, without them you will not be able to have really great io speed... well maybe with a Pic at 20MHz you will be fine, our 6809 was quite slow compare to today clock, darn i can't remember the clock ... ( maybe 1MHz) ...
you surely will have fun to do it. we did and got something like 95% on that school work
)
the real utility of all that now will be really none existant, but
next step will be to design your own hard-drive controller, there still some improvement to do there!