RE: TI-H: Why expander? Why compress? Use a FDD!

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RE: TI-H: Why expander? Why compress? Use a FDD!

here's the deal, I think it can be done.  The deal is that the floppy drive interface is not parallel, it's serial.  That results in a drastically simplified system.  However, reading a disk all the time is very difficult.  There was a proposal a while back to use a 2MB memory chip to buffer the entire disk, but that's somewhat impractical.  what we can do is read the FAT onto a memory chip.  It would be smaller, and we could even use an EEPROM.  The one that Bryan used in the EuP was supposed to be usable forever, but you would have to refresh the entire array every so often.  If we get a lower density version of that chip, we're set, since the array is reset everytime you change disks!
	To continue, what needs to be added in is something like cal or the graphlink software on a chip.  It receives data from the link port and saves it in standard .8xx format.  It's still complex, but doable.  there are a lot of control pins for the drives, so it's something to think about.
	However, I'm not about to call it quits on this project.  What we need then is that the calculator itself must decode the data, so there has to be a bypass from the AVR, so that we can avoid killing the AVR memory.  Or we could do PCMCIA conversion (still tougher), and connect any standardized device.
Christopher Kalos
raptorone@stuytech.com
Executive Director/Administrator
Virtual Technologies Developer's Group


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From: 	Grant Stockly[SMTP:gussie@alaska.net]
Sent: 	Saturday, January 17, 1998 8:27 PM
To: 	ti-hardware@lists.ticalc.org
Subject: 	RE: TI-H: Why expander? Why compress? Use a FDD!


>well, the deal (yet again)  is power, and that blasted link port.  maybe
>with an AVR (is there an echo out here?), it will work.

Power and...valuable time!  It would take a year or half to get it working!

It would work with the 4414 AVR.  I looked into it, but as I think, flash
is the way to go.

Grant
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