@OzzyDweller has 5,000 3.5" Amiga floppy disks that he needs to archive, so he built a glorious rube-goldbergian floppy-disk bulk-importing device. It has a magazine filled with floppies that are auto-inserted into a drive, copied, spat out, photographed (so their label art can be captured), and dropped to an untidy higgeldy-piggeldy pile on the floor. He figured out the clever intake and exhaust mechanism by reverse-engineering a bulk floppy writer from eBay.
This last part finally meant I could just load it up with disks and leave it to it. It will hold around 80 disks a time in the hopper, and each one is fed into the drive, ripped to stream & adf format by the kryoflux, then ejected. As it pops out, the solenoid blocks it from going too far, the camera takes its picture and then the solenoid fires letting the disk fall to the ground. Check out a few more pictures of the oddball woodwork & the unit here.
So far in over 300 disks, it has had 1 disk cause a blockage (am I glad I carefully wrote the code to check that!!) which was due to a badly torn and peeling label. We'll ignore the 20 or so disks I had to redo after I turned out the light in the room where it was running & thus had nice black images instead of disk photos.
It takes around 3 to 4 minutes per disk, so I've got a few weekends ahead of me with it running as much as possible.. meanwhile, I need to write some software to let me browse & catalogue all this data!
Converting all my Amiga Disks.. (via Neatorama)
