Linux

Floppy drives don't use IDE, they use their own type of connector ( called a floppy connector), I've never seen a Sata to floppy adaptor, but you can connect a usb to floppy adapter to an internal usb header

Wow, floppies.

I would suggest looking for a 3.5" unit rather than 5.25", the small floppies are sturdier.

Even so a floppy can get corrupted at any time so personally I wouldn't bother with a filesystem and mounting it, I'd just write a bunch of numbers in various places on the disk and attempt to read with dd from several spots.

If you want to go with a filesystem and mount, please be aware that floppy units don't send a signal when you load a floppy, like CD units do. You just have to try and see if there's anything in there.

You can use automount to mount a floppy when you access a directory but it's more trouble then it's worth imo.

Oh and it also takes a while for the drive to probe and access the floppy (can take 5-10 seconds).

If you want my opinion, I'd do anything except actually having to bother reading floppies. 🙂 I would look into an USB smartcard reader and use smartcards instead.

If that's not cool enough and you really want to use floppies, I'd conceal an USB NFC reader inside the PC and stick NFC tags to the floppies and load them inside the unit purely for the cool factor, without actually hooking up the floppy drive. Not sure if they'll be easily readable from inside the drive but I'd try, like I said I'd do anything. 😄

Do yourself a favor and just use a USB floppy drive 👍

From one perspective, it should work; from another I never thought about how SATA/IDE adapters exactly work in this regard. Would any old one work, or most, or (almost) none at all?

Just to add this idea, I've used internal floppy drives with USB connection in the past, to attach in systems that don't have an old style floppy connector.

P.S.: Love the idea! I'm also a great fan of haptic/physical interfaces.

No idea how to do this properly, but it's definitely possible. Maybe a USB to IDE adapter makes more sense than going through SATA as it can just expose the floppy drive as a USB stick.

But then again CD drives have been around for ages as well and work properly on linux, so do your research.

The steps will probably look like this:

• Autodetect when a floppy is inserted
• mount it (possibly combined with the first step)
• automatically run a script after mounting
• writing the script, which will read the contents of the drive and control your player (chatGPT should be able to do that for you with a bit of trial&error)

I’ve tried using a floppy on arch recently using a usb and a usb adapter with an original drive.

It works rather well, but it’s seen as a root drive. So long as you can give yourself root access it’s all good.

On that note you should get one of those internal usb 2 to female usb headers as it can allow you access if there isn’t a free usb port available

The floppy drive is seen automatically and still fully supported in Debian 12 x86_64. You might have to mount the diskette to actually read it, but you can do that in fstab to do it on boot or ondemand or mount it manually.

You should be able to get it to automount with autofs and unmount when it hasn't been read for a certain amount of time. I would suggest mounting the disks read only so they don't get corrupted it they are removed without unmounting them though.