Repair of a dead Amiga A500 floppy drive. It is an Epson but not sure of the model, it has 2 stickers: - SMD400 - SMD480 / analogthinker en.tipeee.com/analog-thinker
Another great video!!! I think most people would have just tossed the bad floppy drive in the garbage and eBay’ed another, so it’s really impressive to see you repair this one despite its failures!
Nice work. I have a Chinon drive that recognizes the disks but won't start loading them (doesn't kill the disks). Drive is cleaned and recapped. Don't have the skills or equipment to look up further.
Nice! I have a dead Panasonic ju-253-031p - the motor controller Hitachi HA13748 is shorted (burned a hole) and I would like to know I can source that chip anywhere! Keep up the good work.
There is no secret place I know of, unfortunately I resolved to check eBay and in parallel ask for quotes from those obscure vintage part merchants (that half the time look like scam and never reply, the other half probably offering rebadged/reprinted salvaged parts) but heh, sometimes worth the risk... So all in all, be careful, use a gift VISA card if you think it's too good to be true and good luck in your repair! Thanks for the support, cheers George!
@@AnalogThinker thank you for you input! I found a similar controller and will try that first. The other guys you mention seem to stock the right one but require $100 minimum order! I'll also check normal (not Amiga) floppy drives from that era - maybe I can salvage a conrtoller this way. Take care!
I like your video but I have a question. I see that you have removed a head stepper motor for testing. It has tooth ring around so I presume for aligning purpose. Is it hard to align it after that? Are there any softwares which can check head aligment for Amiga?
I would recommend the proper way and the right tools: acquire of a calibration floppy and a good scope! Then there are a lot of service and calibration manuals around to do the proper head alignment, it is surgical. Most service manuals, if you can still find them, should include the proper procedure and if lucky, also the waveform you should expect. Now, if you asked I may guess you don't have those and understandably may not want to invest in expensive Cal Disk and Scope, especially for a one off. In this case, I have not tested this but, the Amiga Test Kit has a calibration section in the Floppy menu, I guess you could play with the alignment wheel and check if the track reads as you tweak. IF this works, it will be far from accurate and you may have a lot of read/write errors when using Floppies from other machines. However I'm curious, let me know!
@@tiemanowo maybe you are using the wrong search words. Try doing a google image search with "shugart floppy pinout" and you will have thousands of diagrams. If I remember I used jumpers directly on the back IDC connector. You probably want the DS0 (10) and MotorOn (16) to ground, and if you have, a scope on ReadData on pin 30.
