Reduce, Reuse, Recycle!

[kc7gr]

The entirety of my hobby, self-hosted Internet presence included, would not exist now if not for the presence of surplus/used equipment. As the most recent example, I present my Kryoflux board which has been custom-built into an old Sun Microsystems external disk drive housing.




The board itself is mounted on a custom-built bracket I made out of a spare section of sheet aluminum (we have a sheet-metal brake and drilling gear at my day job). The floppy drive involved is a Teac dual. These consist of a 5.25" 1.2MB and 3.5" 1.44MB unit in a single 5.25" half-height chassis. Working ones are pretty rare these days... In fact, I had to scavenge the 3.5" drive off another unit which had a bad 5.25" section to get a single working unit.

I've put write-protect and board reset switches on the front panel. I also (carefully) unsoldered the original red power LED on the board and tied in a panel-mounted green one. Bless Metcal and their desoldering tweezers!

This unit is mainly for storing and preserving image files of non-PC/non-Mac floppies. The most current example is a multifunction telecom test set I have, made by the long-defunct NCC (Network Communications Corp). It uses a custom-written OS and custom-formatted floppies, and I've still yet to determine which standard, exactly, the manufacturer used for the floppies.

Happy tweaking.

[mr.vince]

Ahhh, so much hardware p0rn. Really, very well executed. I always thought about putting a pair of connectors for the LEDs somewhere, but then again, we'd need a second one to disable the LED present. But we'll have that on the list for a re-design.

Either way, very well done. Looks lovely!