Motor Behavior Changes

For this release, motor behavior has been changed when reading the disk. The built in motor functions do some unnecessary waiting in regards to reading a disk. Therefore when a new disk is detect, we instead write to the motor pin directly. Doing this saves about 1 second, bring the read times down to 900ms ~ 1500ms depending on drive and configuration.

Mutliple Firmware Update, New Polling Method

The project now uses PlatformIO instead of Arduino IDE. One of the main benefits of this change is that it’s much easier to build and maintain multiple firmware variants for different drive configurations. See the README for a full breakdown of the differences between each build.

This update also introduces an additional polling method based on the index pulse. In addition to the existing write-protect polling, you can now choose index-based detection depending on your drive’s behavior.

If you’re upgrading from a previous version, firmware_no_redetect_write_polling.uf2 is equivalent to the firmware that was previously provided.

Autodect Disk Update

This release features a modified Adafruit Floppy library capable of auto-detecting several IBM floppy formats (such as 720KB and 1.44MB). By default, the drive is configured for 1.44MB disks. While you may experience a slight delay when inserting a disk with a different format, subsequent reads of the same format will be significantly more responsive. For a smoother experience, you can manually adjust the default format to better match your media collection.

Zaparoo Release

The code has now been updated to support "zaparoo.txt", which is preferred "tapto.txt". "tapto.txt" will still work for backwards compatibility.

Release 1

The first compiled release of the M4 Express.