Green LED dim when idle - normal?

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cc213t
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Green LED dim when idle - normal?

Post by cc213t »

I have a Gotek SFR1M44-U100K with OLED and rotary encoder mods successfully running HxC firmware v3.5.1.12a, installed in a Technics SX-F100 organ. The only jumper is on S1, and the personality is set to generic Shugart. Everything works fine so far except that the green LED is continuously lit at a dim level (about 15% of full brightness) when the drive is idle. It does turn on to normal brightness when the drive is being accessed. Is this an intentional feature, or is it a sign of incorrect wiring between the 34-pin connector and the organ? I'm using a 34-pin -> 24-conductor FPC adapter made by Andreas Feer in Germany and sold on eBay.

Jeff
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Re: Green LED dim when idle - normal?

Post by Jeff »

Hello,

In fact the green led is directly connected to the machine floppy select line : The firmware is not driving it at all ! I suppose that the Technics is polling the drive to detect the user disk change.

The only thing you can do is to try to disconnect it. Right now i have no other idea :?.

cc213t
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Re: Green LED dim when idle - normal?

Post by cc213t »

Thanks Jeff! It does look like the LED might be pulsing when the drive is idle, supporting your theory. I'll do a little probing and also check whether the original floppy drive shows the same behavior and I just didn't notice.

cc213t
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Re: Green LED dim when idle - normal?

Post by cc213t »

The original floppy drive doesn't show the dim activity LED problem, but somehow the Gotek does if jumpered to activate on DS1; "RA" flashes at high speed on the OLED too (faster than the display can update). But I was able to eliminate this problem by moving the jumper to "MO" to activate the Gotek on the motor signal instead, which should be OK since there's only one drive present. The 24-conductor flat cable to 34-pin adapter required some minor modifications to work properly on the Technics SX-F100. I'll summarize them in another post, with photos.

One problem I'm still investigating is that if I take a blank 1.44 MB floppy .img file, write some files to it with the organ, confirm they are there, then re-format that virtual disk using the organ, formatting completes OK according to the organ UI, and I see the expected activity on the Gotek's OLED display, but the files are still present afterwards (not just the directory entries but their data, too, as the files still load properly). If I do the same thing with the original floppy drive connected instead, the files are gone after formatting, as expected. The organ writes floppies using a standard DOS FAT12 filesystem, so if reading and writing the virtual floppies is otherwise working OK, I don't see why formatting wouldn't also work. I have pin 2 configured for nDiskChanged (mode 1), but this signal is not connected on the organ side (its pad doesn't go anywhere). I have pin 34 configured as nReady, which is working correctly (the organ reports no disk inserted if HxC is in select mode).

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Re: Green LED dim when idle - normal?

Post by Jeff »

Moving the jumper to MO will probably broke the disk change detection.

about the formatting : is it working with hfe files ?

cc213t
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Re: Green LED dim when idle - normal?

Post by cc213t »

Interesting test! With HFE files (I used the sample 1.44 MB IBM PC HFE from your website), the formatting works OK; after formatting, the organ sees the disk contents as empty. However, there are some problems:
  • The formatting operation takes twice as long (2:24 vs. 1:11 for IMG files). No errors are displayed on the organ.
  • Reading and writing to the HFE disk takes twice as long as with IMG files.
  • The activity LED on the USB flash drive flashes constantly the whole time the HFE disk is mounted, even when RA and WA are not displayed. If I unmount the HFE disk (return HxC to the selection menu), the flash drive's activity LED turns off. If I mount an IMG file, the USB flash drive's activity LED only flashes during actual read/write operations.
I prefer to use IMG format since the organ disks are just standard FAT12 PC DOS-type disks with no special signaling, the IMG format is more compatible with other tools, the IMG files are smaller, and the I/O speed is faster. Do you have any thoughts regarding the differences seen with HFE files?

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Re: Green LED dim when idle - normal?

Post by Jeff »

cc213t wrote:
Wed Oct 21, 2020 7:44 am
Interesting test! With HFE files (I used the sample 1.44 MB IBM PC HFE from your website), the formatting works OK; after formatting, the organ sees the disk contents as empty.
cc213t wrote:
Wed Oct 21, 2020 7:44 am
The formatting operation takes twice as long (2:24 vs. 1:11 for IMG files). No errors are displayed on the organ.
Reading and writing to the HFE disk takes twice as long as with IMG files.
Which usb stick are you using ?
cc213t wrote:
Wed Oct 21, 2020 7:44 am
[*]The activity LED on the USB flash drive flashes constantly the whole time the HFE disk is mounted, even when RA and WA are not displayed. If I unmount the HFE disk (return HxC to the selection menu), the flash drive's activity LED turns off. If I mount an IMG file, the USB flash drive's activity LED only flashes during actual read/write operations.
[/list]
This is normal. The track doesn't fit in the emulator memory and the motor-on signal isn't used in your setup.
cc213t wrote:
Wed Oct 21, 2020 7:44 am
I prefer to use IMG format since the organ disks are just standard FAT12 PC DOS-type disks with no special signaling, the IMG format is more compatible with other tools, the IMG files are smaller, and the I/O speed is faster. Do you have any thoughts regarding the differences seen with HFE files?
The HFE content match exactly to the machine disk format after a format (it contains all the format details) and from a safety point of view it contains sector CRC. (This is not the case for IMG files : An corrupted IMG can't be detected by the machine... Quite dangerous when you think about it...)

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Re: Green LED dim when idle - normal?

Post by Jeff »

Btw, why are you still playing with img/hfe files with a dos compatible machine ? You should switch to the Image-Less mode :wink: :

viewtopic.php?p=16457#p16457

cc213t
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Re: Green LED dim when idle - normal?

Post by cc213t »

My flash drive is a Kingston DT101 G2 16GB formatted FAT32 by Win10. Regarding the lack of CRC checking, it's not completely missing, it's just on the file I/O of reading from the IMG file instead of contained within the image data itself on a per-sector basis, right? I see your point why the HFE approach is better, though.

I'll try the image-less mode next. I've been concerned about the 128 partition limit (was planning to keep all my images on a single flash drive), plus I'm anticipating a messy experience when inserting a flash drive with that many partitions on an OS like Windows or MacOS, since these OSes would automatically mount all those sub-disks and write their little metafiles everywhere, which might confuse the organ if I don't clean them up before each unmount.

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Re: Green LED dim when idle - normal?

Post by Jeff »

cc213t wrote:
Wed Oct 21, 2020 9:45 am
My flash drive is a Kingston DT101 G2 16GB formatted FAT32 by Win10. Regarding the lack of CRC checking, it's not completely missing, it's just on the file I/O of reading from the IMG file instead of contained within the image data itself on a per-sector basis, right?
Sure, but a legal expert at the court may think that this is an engineering misconception/fraud :wink: . Nothing guarantee you that the usb stick and/or the gotek firmware is free of bug... The "fake" crc may be computed from corrupted data, and this is the issue with img files.
( Of course i am talking here about "serious" stuff (industrial and avionics domain), not about hobby stuff :D . )

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Re: Green LED dim when idle - normal?

Post by Jeff »

This usb stick may be slow with small write packet. But about the reading taking twice time : Have you made the read test before or after the hfe format ?

(I will check/test the img formatting support)

cc213t
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Re: Green LED dim when idle - normal?

Post by cc213t »

Today I tried a different, smaller USB flash drive (512 MB capacity), formatted FAT32 with allocation unit size set to default and to 512 bytes, but I'm still seeing similar performance for HFE files. Still takes about 2:15 to format a 1.44 MB HFE image in both cases.

Also noticed that with IMG files, if I delete a file using the organ UI, the file remains intact (shows up in the directory listing and can still be loaded successfully). But if I use an HFE file, file deletion from the organ UI works as expected. Maybe the formatting and file deletion issues with IMG files are related.

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Re: Green LED dim when idle - normal?

Post by Jeff »

cc213t wrote:
Thu Oct 22, 2020 11:04 am
Also noticed that with IMG files, if I delete a file using the organ UI, the file remains intact (shows up in the directory listing and can still be loaded successfully). But if I use an HFE file, file deletion from the organ UI works as expected. Maybe the formatting and file deletion issues with IMG files are related.
mhhh this issue is very very odd then. file creation and save is working as expected ?

Do you have the same issue with the jumper set to S0 ?

cc213t
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Re: Green LED dim when idle - normal?

Post by cc213t »

IMG files have the same issues with the jumper set to S0/S1 (S1 in my case, due to how the cable/adapter is wired). File creation, loading, and saving all work as expected for both IMG and HFE. Overall appearance and behavior of the emulator is perfect with HFE files, just slower (slower than the original floppy drive). IMG files match the original performance but still have these quirks with formatting and deleting.

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Re: Green LED dim when idle - normal?

Post by Jeff »

cc213t wrote:
Thu Oct 22, 2020 6:50 pm
IMG files have the same issues with the jumper set to S0/S1 (S1 in my case, due to how the cable/adapter is wired). File creation, loading, and saving all work as expected for both IMG and HFE. Overall appearance and behavior of the emulator is perfect with HFE files, just slower (slower than the original floppy drive). IMG files match the original performance but still have these quirks with formatting and deleting.
I may explain (and fix) the formatting issue. But i don't understand the delete issue.

I will provide you a special firmware to make some test with hfe files. This will help me to understand how this machine is deleting a file...

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