• viking
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    1 year ago

    My friend’s dad has a CNC machine that requires floppy disks to load the design patterns. He’s worried that a mechanical failure of the disk drive will eventually be the end of it, rather than the machine itself being obsolete. It’s been going strong for almost 40 years now.

    • purplemonkeymad@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      Look for usb floppy emulators, you can have the floppy images in a usb flash drive. No moving parts or need to find expensive floppies.

        • renormalizer@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          It’s reverse: you get a board that has a floppy interface on one side and a USB socket on the other. You plug in a USB drive and the board uses a file on the drive as the floppy disk, pretending to be a floppy Drive connected to the interface. It’s a little less convenient because you have to deal with disk images but it works without moving parts.

    • pyt0xic@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It might be possible to buy an old floppy drive off ebay and switch out the broken one of that happens, as long as there are no proprietary connectors and such…