I have searched through the message archives, and it seems that the same question keeps coming up.

How do you go about controlling, reading, and writing from a floppy disk without using a controller.

Unfortunately, the question has never been answered. Instead people keep responding by saying "don't do it, just use a controller" or "try this controller" or "if you can find machine X, you can pull the controller out of it".. and of course going on to talk about Dos compatibility and etc.

Does anyone have any information for someone who wishes to use a floppy disk drive directly?

In my case all I really need is to be able to write a block of data (say 32k max) and read it back later... No file system, nothing fancy.

So far all i've managed to gather on the internet is the basic pinout of the PC's floppy drive cable.

When the read/write pins to the drive are used, is this actually a fixed data rate or is it more like a glorified cassette tape interface? ie if I can spin the disk and write high and low at a given rate (regardless of what that rate is) will the disk then spit out the same highs and lows at the same rate when reading?

If this is the case, couldn't a very simple interface be built that uses a long pulse for a 1 and a short pulse for a 0, using software timing to tell the difference and decode? (this would be much easier to implement than a fixed data rate where every high is a 1)

It seems that a very basic explanation of how the floppy drive works would be valuable to anyone working on microcontroller/homebrew projects.

My project will not actually be using an 8052, but rather a 20mhz Z80 but the basic concepts are the same, and will carry over to any processor or microcontroller that the home hobbyist might be using. If necessary I will resort to building a cassette tape interface, though I would greatly prefer a simple floppy system.

Even something that could write a fixed length small block of data would be enough. Maybe I'd make it a little fancier eventually by being able to select different tracks so that each track could contain a seperate "file".