• Updated 2023-07-12: Hello, Guest! Welcome back, and be sure to check out this follow-up post about our outage a week or so ago.

Stupid Floppy Accessory Idea

olePigeon

Well-known member
A status LED breakout board for floppy, HDD, and power. The idea for this comes from the Apple external floppy drive. I currently use the daisy-chain-board from an Apple external drive to give my floppy drive a status LED. Only way I know how at the moment. However, it's a bit chunky. It'll fit in a Mac tower, but difficult to fit in a pizza box Mac like an LC (LED makes the floppy slot glow on disk access.) So the idea is to make a board with pass-through floppy ribbon connector to re-enable floppy status LED, but also add input headers (or holes to add the appropriate header or just solder some wires) for power & HDD status LEDs. Then have a jumper to choose between 2 sets of output headers for either 3 separate LEDs or a single output header fro an oldschool tri-color LED (i.e. the ones that are red/green/amber.)

That way on machines that only have a power LED (like a IIfx, IIsi, PowerMac G3, or potentially SE with the HDD slot cover with LED window), you can also use that single LED location as a status LED for your floppy and HDD (and power, in the case of the SE.) Or on machines like the IIci that have both power and HDD, use 2 of the colors in the tri-color for the HDD and floppy access.

For machines with no status LEDs at all like the LC or SE/30, I've found that you can see the ambient light from a flashing LED through the floppy slot opening just fine.

a2-daisy-chain.jpeg
 

LaPorta

Well-known member
Not a bad idea, however…I’ve always just listened to the Sonys chugging away and never had a need for a light. Are some that quiet?
 

Phipli

Well-known member
Not a bad idea, however…I’ve always just listened to the Sonys chugging away and never had a need for a light. Are some that quiet?
The one in my Centris is surprisingly quiet, but you can still hear it.
 

olePigeon

Well-known member
My traditional hard drives are pretty loud, so the floppy drive is drowned out.

However, this is more to do with blinkenlights. I love the soft glow of defused vintage LEDs blinking when the HDD and floppy disk are accessed.
 

Phipli

Well-known member
However, this is more to do with blinkenlights. I love the soft glow of defused vintage LEDs blinking when the HDD and floppy disk are accessed.
I replaced the red LED in my SE with an Amber one, messing about, but also red means bad to me.

Modern LEDs are a touch brighter and it lights up things across the room at night :ROFLMAO:
 

volvo242gt

Well-known member
View attachment 45348

Don't mind the tray CD. I switched in the bezel and drive. It didn't have a CD. Sure it would have been a caddy drive if it was stock.

Sounds like yours was similarly equipped to how mine was. At least your bezel seems to match the case more than mine... lol Does your machine have the ethernet port, or is it the basic 4MB onboard RAM system?

The manual inject drives came out when the Q610 and Q650 were introduced, btw. So, all Q700, Q800, Q900/950, C610/650 machines had the older Sony MP-F75W mechanisms. Some early Q840av machines seem to have them as well. Only Centris machine that had a manual inject drive was the short-lived 660av, which was renamed the Quadra 660av.

The floppy LED idea sounds interesting. Could maybe put it below the mechanism somehow, so it'd glow like a 400K drive.
 

Phipli

Well-known member

Sounds like yours was similarly equipped to how mine was. At least your bezel seems to match the case more than mine... lol Does your machine have the ethernet port, or is it the basic 4MB onboard RAM system?

The manual inject drives came out when the Q610 and Q650 were introduced, btw. So, all Q700, Q800, Q900/950, C610/650 machines had the older Sony MP-F75W mechanisms. Some early Q840av machines seem to have them as well. Only Centris machine that had a manual inject drive was the short-lived 660av, which was renamed the Quadra 660av.
Nice machine :). Mine is an ethernet/8mb/25mhz/fpu model, but I have a 40MHz 040 in it and a replacement clock.

Early 610s have the manual inject too. They were announced together like you say.

I wonder why they switched so suddenly and didn't wait for new products. I wonder if they fell out with Sony or the drives were discontinued.
 

CC_333

Well-known member
I wonder why they switched so suddenly and didn't wait for new products. I wonder if they fell out with Sony or the drives were discontinued.
Probably to cut costs, as I'm sure the auto-inject mechanisms were a bit more expensive to build.

c
 
Top