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Sometimes it takes a modern eye to innovate on problems of the past. Today we have an amazing creation to share that does just that from the creator and developer. Graham Tinkers. Graham created a custom archiving system using parts from disc duplicators and our favorite SBC, the Raspberry Pito automatically process stacks of floppy disks and save them to a USB stick.

Graham is sitting on a stack of over 800 Commodore Amiga floppy disks with the intention of manually backing them up. Looking through the disc stack, we can see some “saves” in the mix. The Amiga scene was known for pirated software that was pirated and shared through disk copying groups and BBSs.
For those a little too young to remember the Commodore Amiga range. The Amiga 1000 was introduced in 1985 and shook up the market as it was. Custom hardware and a preemptive multitasking operating system meant the Amiga was ahead of its time, but also expensive. The range included a plethora of low and high cost machines. Typically, machines like the 500, 500+, 600, and 1200 take up a larger percentage of the lineup due to their lower cost and consumer-focused design. The more expensive Amigas, for example the 2000 and 4000, often found their way into the television industry in the 80s and 90s.

The idea was born when Graham became the owner of some old disc duplicators. He ended up integrating them into this project that uses a motorized mechanism to automatically insert floppy disks into duplicators from a battery. The disks are ejected using the spring loading of the floppy disk drive. The installation can hold approximately 50 disks at a time and consolidates them into a full stack when completed. Graham only encountered a few issues, such as a label peeling off and sticking to a spindle of the disc, so it is necessary to monitor it during the process. It also has programmed error codes for situations such as stuck drives.

The main board that powers the project is a Raspberry Pi 3B. As discs are archived, disc image files are stored on a USB drive. The Raspberry Pi is also connected to a camera module which is used to capture images of the floppy disk as it is copied.

The software that controls the operation is Greaseweazlean open source tool used to help read data from floppy disks. Graham confirmed in the project thread that it is possible to capture a copy-protected stream image, but it doesn’t always work. Once the floppy disk is created as a disk file (we’ll assume it’s a typical ADF file), the images captured by the camera are saved under the same file name as the image from the floppy disk but with a .jpg extension.

According to Graham, the plan is to donate the machine to a local makerspace in Berlin so that others can also use the system to archive their floppy disk collections. If you want to see this Raspberry Pi Project in action, you can check it out on the original project thread shared with X (formerly Twitter).