[Hardware] Raspberry Pi Gets 5.25-inch Floppy Drive Support

[FalCoNNN-]

Long gone are the days of limiting your Raspberry Pi with large-capacity microSD cards and SSDs. Thanks to Dr. Scott Baker's latest project, makers are finally free to use 360K floppy disks for all their legacy storage needs!  The best Raspberry Pi projects are made from scratch and this one definitely fits the bill. Dr. Baker has created a custom HAT for the Raspberry Pi designed to interface with a floppy disk drive. It's able to read, write and even format old 360K floppies with a custom, Python-based application.

The project relies on a WD-37C65 controller—a vintage chip from Western Digital. While Dr. Baker is using it with a Tandom TM100-2A floppy drive, it's also compatible with 1.44MB, 3.5-inch drives.The controller has been adapted to a HAT that plugs directly onto the Raspberry Pi GPIO pins and provides access to a floppy header, used for connecting floppy drives.