1.44 floppy mod Assembly guide?

[Darklord]

Thanks for all the helpful suggestions. I've not had a chance to continue with this yet.

BTW, I've been using one of those "Weller" soldering models:

Capture.JPG (33.63 KiB) Viewed 351 times

Hopefully later today or tomorrow I can work on this some more...

[Darklord]

@Exxos:

Just wondering, in the interest of narrowing things down, can I use
the P/S pass through on the flippy board to power a 1.44 HD floppy
drive thus checking it and the 1.44 HD floppy mod without involving
the rest of the board itself? I'd then have to flip the cable to the
1.44 drive of course.

That way I could isolate whether my issue is with the flippy board or
the 1.44 mod itself, if possible.

Thanks.

[Darklord]

I reflowed the solder joints on the flippy board, but it didn't make any difference.

So I pulled the flippy board, just leaving the P/S plugged into the 1.44 floppy drive
mech and manually flipped the FD cable and tried it that way. It works, as you can
see below:

20240814_143537.jpg (152.93 KiB) Viewed 315 times

It's also reading 720k disks correctly:

20240814_143727.jpg (172.1 KiB) Viewed 315 times

Although the desktop formatter option doesn't show HD. I thought it was supposed to?

20240814_143630.jpg (149.61 KiB) Viewed 315 times

So with the 1.44 mod obviously working and ruled out, that leaves the flippy board and
whatever I screwed up on it. I'll go back and check all my connections again to see if I
can find what I muffed up...

[Darklord]

Okay, I went back and reflowed the joints again, then cleaned everything
up really good and...it seems to be working. At least for now.

I'll check it periodically over the next few days to make sure it's stable.

You can see the board in place and working below:

STacy Flippy FD Cable Board.JPG (178.48 KiB) Viewed 300 times

[Darklord]

One thing though, for whatever reason, I'm still not getting the High Density format option
from the drop-down desktop menu.

Anyone have any idea why that would be? It's TOS v3.06 and it did show that with the old
1.44 HD floppy setup I originally had in place.

It's nothing critical, the Formatter CPX will do the job, I'm just curious about it.

Thanks all.

[Darklord]

Okay, things seem to be mostly stable with the 1.44 HD floppy mod and "flippy" board.

I would highly recommend to anyone that decides to do this same mod for a STacy to
make one change.

If I had to do it again, I would leave the socket off for the 1.44 HD mod PCB and just
solder the WD1772 directly to it. I started to remove the socket and do it anyway.

Why? Because there's really not enough space between the hard drive (or Ultrasatan)
in the floppy/hard drive cage/cradle and the 1.44 HD mod PCB with the arrangement
of the chips on the STacy motherboard.

You can see what I'm talking about in the picture below.

20240811_153914b.jpg (282.54 KiB) Viewed 211 times

[Darklord]

Oh, just wanted to mention one other thing. I found the software that comes with the
Elco HD 1.44 floppy drive mod. In the archive it has a small AUTO folder program that
enables the high density format option from the drop down menu in TOS. Here's a picture
of it working on my STacy. I'll attach the ZIP file for it as well.

I think at this point I can (dare I tempt fate!?) say that I'm done with this upgrade.

PS Thanks as always everyone, for all the help.

20240823_001830.jpg (149.17 KiB) Viewed 164 times

ELCO_HD.ZIP

(26.47 KiB) Downloaded 3 times