[Jim] has a box of disks for a extremely old Compucolor II computer, and with bit rot slowly setting in he figured it may be time to dump all those disks to a much more long-term format. After evaluating the existing tools to checked out these disks, he chose to build his own floppy disk interface that he phone calls the DiskVaccuum.

The DiskVaccuum is based on a Papilio pro FPGA board and a few chips worth of level conversion. The FPGA is able to checked out bits and relocation the head of the disk with ease, saving everything to the drive of a much much more contemporary computer.

On the USB side of the Papilio board, [Jim] composed a shell of sorts in Python to catch tracks on the disk, checked out out the track listing, save an picture file, and do all the things a appropriate DOS should. best now the job is only for the Compucolor II disk drive, but [Jim] played around with KiCAD enough to create a Papilio-to-disk-drive interface board with connectors for many of the disk drives of this specific vintage. The hope is to generalize the hardware and software application to checked out disks for other systems, including those with 8-inch drives.

[Jim] put up a video explaining the hardware and demoing his Python catch utility. You can inspect that out below.