The author,, is looking for Commodore 1541 and Apple CLV disks to borrow so he can get those working. However, being open source, it could do more. It can also read and write Brother word processor disks. Currently, the firmware only supports read only access to IBM standard disks and Acorn DFS/ADFS disks. The device uses a $15 Cypress development board and just some wiring (along with a 3.5 or 5.25 floppy drive, of course).
That is, except for Flux Engine, an open source USB floppy drive. While these do exist, they typically won’t read oddball formats. You might think you beat the system just by having a USB floppy drive. Do you have a ZIP drive? Do you have a computer that it will work with? Floppies are problem too. Data on a variety of tapes and disks that were once common, is now trapped on media due to lack of hardware to read it.
It is a bit of a paradox that we are storing more and more information digitally, yet every year more and more of it is becoming harder to access.
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