Building an Atari XF 351 with a laptop drive and a case from a 3D printer

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Ot, Atari never made a 3.5" station for the 8-bit series. The XF 351 never got beyond the prototype stage. I thought I would change that The choice fell on the XF551.
I built the electronics based on a schematic from the net. New board in SMD drawn in DipTrace, ordered from JLCPCB.

XF 551 schematic.

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Plate.

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The choice of drive from a laptop was dictated by dimensions and availability. You can still buy new stock loungers. Here I have used the drive from an IBM laptop.

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I drew the housing in SketchUP.

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Printed from Hyper PLA on Creality K1 MAX. It could have come out better, but here I made a compromise between quality and speed. It takes over 220 minutes to print anyway.

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SIO plug to connect the station to the Atari printed from a model from the internet.

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I also added a module on FT232 to communicate the station with the PC and the Aspeqt program to load disk images.

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On the back of the drive is a switch to select the station number. D1 to D4. There is a power socket and a SIO2PC USB output. The switch didn't quite fit anymore, so I dispensed with it.

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I also managed to get hold of a WD1772 controller, a VL1772 to be precise (unfortunately these are hard to find and quite expensive), so I installed Hyper XF, an alternative ROM to speed up the station.

A graphic designer friend also made a sticker.
So there you have it .

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