Falcon030 Repair

[jamesrhq]

This is the current plan, in 1.5mm aluminium for panels. I have the aluminium, but haven't tried bending or milling yet! I'm getting there, slowly. Finding free time to do this stuff is always tricky... :)

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[viking272]

That's brilliant, looks really good.
The psu I see is on the right hand side or is it just an inverse image?
Yes time is a big factor in these projects!
The only other consideration for a Falcon is what internal upgrades would you fit and would that change the height?
I appreciate it's a design for your two motherboards but there is always interest in cases. If the left side was also a printed facia where the port location could be changed (like the rear ports) it could also mean the case could fit a variety of motherboards.

[jamesrhq]

Yes, the PSU on the right where the floppy would normally be. This was to free up the expansion header area. The overall internal height is about 60mm from motherboard top to case top currently, which I think is more than you'd get in stock case. More than enough for an acelerator. I'm not sure what other internal mods you might want other than an accelerator of some kind...

The idea of producing some cases to sell has certainly crossed my mind, I'll see how it pans out. The front and rear 3D printed panels are quite large, so I expect them to be suitably expensive to get done commercially. And injection moulding is expensive enough for setup to make it an unlikely option given I can't imagine many people would want one, and each PCB would require a different rear panel for port cutouts.

When I get it finished I'll put the resources to build it online somewhere, it's certainly a do-able home project even with limited tools.

[alexh]

So you will soon have two working Falcon030 motherboards?

[jamesrhq]

Yes, looks that way! I've got a bit more testing (and chip replacement) to do, but it's looking promising.

[jamesrhq]

I finally got around to hooking up a floppy drive and a "disk on module" IDE solid state drive. Works a treat! It's the first time I've ever had an Atari with a hard drive! :)

I've been working on the adapter electronics for the Falcon Box. It uses an STM32 with flash floppy for the floppy emulation (gotek clone), has another simple micro for ATX power management (soft power control) and an internal to external keyboard converter. I'm trying to make this nice and neat. ;)

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[alexh]

Looks good.

It was my thinking that STM32 became impossible to source for a while and so Gotek (and thus FlashFloppy) starting using a different MCU. Are you sure you can source STM32 cheap / plentiful enough for you?

I do not use the Gotek OLED nor the RGBS overlay nor the jog dial nor more than one button but I do know some users love them?

I prefer to use the HXC Manager software instead (a host driven GUI selection tool compatible with FlashFloppy). It's a bit rough, but way more functional, but there is opportunity to develop a great interface with box art.

I also only use a single button (typically the floppy eject button ) that is context sensitive with the other buttons mapped to short and long press.

[jamesrhq]

STM32 chips were completely unobtainable for a while, as were many Atmel parts, but everything seems to be available again now. I looked at the AT chips, but I don’t want to buy yet another programming tool, and I already have an ST link and the ide is ok. I think everything I need is workable on the STM.

I’m planning on something a little nicer than the usual Gotek display. I’m going to be using a 20x4 lcd and a nicer file selection system. I’m also going to have two drive supported but with a ‘physical drive’ option for drive A or B as well as disk images, hence the two floppy connectors. I’ve used a spinner with button for file selection on the same lcd in other test fixtures and quite liked it. It’s aesthetically quite pleasing as well! Will see how it pans out, I’ve just about procrastinated enough to get more features than I’ll ever need, so it’s almost time to order a PCB…

[jamesrhq]

Getting there, slowly. As usual, the PCB arrived before I got around to ordering parts, but parts have now been ordered! I'll get on and start populating and testing next week. It will be interesting to see how much works, but thanks to the joy of WSL I can at least compile FlashFloppy with ease on Windows.

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[chronicthehedgehog]

Getting there, slowly. As usual, the PCB arrived before I got around to ordering parts, but parts have now been ordered! I'll get on and start populating and testing next week. It will be interesting to see how much works, but thanks to the joy of WSL I can at least compile FlashFloppy with ease on Windows.

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I love WSL as well. It's just a shame I can't ditch the rest of Windows :lol: but I need Visual Studio and SSMS.

Running X apps like they were Windows apps still blows me away. Probably the best thing M$ have ever done :D