KryoFlux - Drive Control

2009-10-07

Recent work:

  • It’s alive - drive control is working now!
  • Commands and settings are fully working now.

Everything should be mostly functional apart from actually reading a disk.

Trying KryoFlux with a board that does not have the external power connected should detect the hardware failure, and set the track number set to 65535. As soon as power is restored it re-calibrates the drive hardware and logic.

Also an issue was fixed so that if you stop with CTRL-Break, the board no longer responds - or at least Windows thinks so. In this version, communication works every time now no matter what, even if you kill the host PC process. Stability on the latest version is rock solid.

It has some neat tricks too in that it can always tell the host that it’s busy (despite working on a command), and it should try again later. So it’s possible to detect whether the board stopped responding or is just working on something.

We were considering making a board reset command that executes immediately even if the board is busy, but no command takes more than a sec or two maximum anyway, and the communication is stable - so far there is no need.

Next we are about to start experimenting with reading data, including a few ideas that were practically impossible to try before the recent work.