Jun 9, 2016 - Mbed as floppy drive emulator. The software is more complicated, the commands are extremely low level, like make a step and motor on.
Hi, I bought a 2001 Haas VF3 that has a GOTEK 'floppy emulator' ( I think that's what it is called) to replace the floppy drive so it can use a USB stick to load programs in the machine. I have a program to run but it wont load.
Doing some research it looks like the USB stick must be 'formatted' to look like a floppy disk to the machine? Then there are two buttons and a 0 to 99 readout on the emulator that you pick what program number you want to load? I am NOT good at all with computer stuff, I've tried online to format the usb but I'm getting no where.
If anybody could walk me through how to format the usb then load a program that would be awesome. I also posted this in the general section. What size of thumb drive were you using? Manu of those types of systems (sorry, not familiar with that specific one) will only work with drives formatted with a FAT filesystem. If you have a larger drive (32gb), it is most likely formatted for NTFS.
The easiest thing to do in that case is just buy a smaller one (should be less that $10). It sounds like anything over a gig should be more than your system can use anyway.
If you have a drive you like and want to reformat it for FAT and give up the extra space, there are utilities for that too. I have an industrial-type single-board computer running a DOS variant that does USB drives. It will only accept smaller drives (I think 2 gig or less) and must be formatted as FAT (16, though not labeled as such) rather than FAT-32 or NTFS. Worth a try, although it may not apply to your situation. ChipThe FAT16 vs FAT32 is something that is likely to trip you up as well. That was a good point.
Rufus is a good program for testing out various formatting options on a drive. The windows gui will only let you pick the file formats it thinks are your best options. Doing some more research on a variety of these emulators, there appear to be several methods in use to encode the different disks.
The one I linked above uses slightly more memory than the size of the disk itself because it is just writing to memory locations and ignoring all the metadata. The manual for CNC Floppy Emulation Manager Tool that th90 mentioned says that it requires 7mb per disk and is compatible with floppy disk images. You could spend a while trying various bits of software to make it work, but given your comment about not being a computer person, I think you would be better off buying a pair of new ones. Put one in the machine and one in your computer. That way you can use the selector on the front to pick what disk you want to be using and treat it like a physical disk (drag/drop files, etc). If you use an interface program like the disk emulator, you will have to jump through the hoops of using that to manually load the files through their interface. It is certainly doable, but the added effort and room for error might not be worth the cost of just buying a second emulator.
Our Floppy Drive Emulator, available in three models, is easy to install, requires no configuration, debugging, & accomplishes the goal to replace floppy disks on the shop floor, which are very difficult to obtain and unreliable. Works with any brand USB stick that is a maximum of 2GB and is FAT/FAT16 formatted. The floppy disk USB adapter emulates your existing floppy drive & acts as if it were never removed.
Works with almost any existing 720k/1.44MB capacity DOS format floppy drive. 28 or 32 pin ribbon cables systems are supported & will connect to your existing power cable.
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