This board helps test floppy drives of several different types:
- Standard IBM 34-pin drives (3.5" and 5.25")
- IBM PS/2 40-pin drives with embedded power connections
- Shugart 8" floppy drives
- Apple II (original Disk II)
- HP 34-pin drives (as found in many 9122 enclosures)
- HP 26-pin drives (found in older enclosures and machines)
- IBM 31SD and 51TD floppy drives
The board basically breaks out every signal to a control switch, indicator LED, or test point. It's not designed as a flux imaging tool--it's just a simple way to exercise features of a floppy drive.
There is an optional section of the board that is a step controller for the head stepper motor. This controller has an encoder wheel and a small 7-segment display. It will let you select and automatically step to a particular track.
Uses an ATmega328PB microcontroller as its CPU.
When you have an outage caused by a performance issue, you don't want to lose precious time just to install the tools needed to diagnose it. Here is a list of "crisis tools" I recommend installing on your Linux servers by default (if they aren't already), along with the (Ubuntu) package names that they come from.
Trippy combines the functionality of traceroute and ping and is designed to assist with the analysis of networking issues. Supports multiple protocols over IPv4 and v6. Network and payload are customizable. Supports multiple routing schemes. Can run without privileges. Text-based interface. Can generate multiple kinds of reports, including Graphviz dot charts.
A curated list of telco resources and projects.
DiskScan is a Unix/Linux tool to scan a block device and check if there are unreadable sectors. In addition it uses read latency times as an assessment for a near failure as sectors that are problematic to read usually entail many retries (and bog the system down). This can be used to assess the state of the disk and maybe decide on a replacement in advance of its imminent failure. The disk self test may or may not pick up on such clues depending on the disk vendor decision making logic.
badblocks looks for fatal issues already happening and diskscan is for upcoming issues that can be fixed.
Also, badblocks is essentially obsolete in this day and age since the disks themselves will reallocate the data and there is no real need to map the bad blocks in the filesystem level anymore.
In the AUR. Works quite well, and sussed out a dying drive on Leandra.
Open Ephys is a site that catalogues open source neuroscience hardware - EEGs, data acquisition boards, EMGs, and other bits of equipment that manufacturers historically never manufactured very well.