Tandy Portable Disk Drive Cables

[Raven]

I have a Portable Disk Drive, and Portable Disk Drive 2 (720K external floppies) but no cables to connect them to the TRS-80 Personal Computer 100 and Tandy 102 I have.

I'm also interested in cables that allow them to hook up to an ordinary serial port on a standard PC (they can be made with some cabling, diodes, and resistors - schematics are googlable), if someone has made them or wants to. Otherwise (though I'm inexperienced), I'll get to doing that one myself some time.

[Terry Yager]

Check Club100, there should be a link somewhere to how to create the cable yourself. (This time a cable isn't just a cable).

--T

[chuckcmagee]

Hmm, think it is still JUST a cable. I seem to recall that the pull-up resistors were not required. I still have my unopened package of Radio Shack resistors sitting here, so I obviously didn't need them.

I have some real ones now. But, they are like grandkids to me, they were so hard to come by! I can't part with them :cool:

My home-brew connector still works too. I could only find a 2 x 5 connector here in the house so I had to widen the plastic just a tad around the male pins on the back of the drive. Really needs a 2 x 4 connector.

The TPPD and TPPD2 drives seem to be showing up more and more frequently on ebay. Maybe you will score a drive with the real cable for a good price. I finally managed that but took a very long time.

I did have a working EPSON DF-10 diskette drive. Talk about hard to find!! It died a somewhat gentle death over a year ago now. Every few days, I do a "vintage epson" search on ebay, with no DF-10 to be found.

[chuckcmagee]

http://web8201.com:8080/tpddcable.asp

There you go. The Bible I used to make my cable.

As previously stated, I didn't bother with any of the pull-up resistors in the diagram. They wouldn't be that tough to put in there. I just thought I could get away with leaving them out and I could. RS232 is very sloppy as far as voltages go anyway. Oh +8 that is fine, +12 ok there too, how about +15 no problem.

Edit: Looking closer at the diagram, I didn't bother with the diodes either!! RS232 can handle super sloppy, it appears.

[Raven]

Sorry to resurrect a post, but I was stupid and didn't save the data from that page, and apparently it has disappeared. I've just got around to looking at making these cables, and now have nothing to go by, heh.

Could you post it somewhere for me? (I swear I'll save it this time! lol!)

Meh I found it with some clever searching based on page filename..

http://www.chickenhut.org/mirror/model100/www.web8201.com/default17d5.html?content=tpddcable.htm

I'd still buy some if anyone has them for cheaper than club100 (they want $25-35 for the damn things)..

As well, I still do have a question, the TPDD2 and TPDD seem to be different, as club100 lists cables for them separately and at different prices... wth? Can I use the same cable for the two or not? If not, what do I need to do differently from that schematic set to make a TPDD2 cable?

[chuckcmagee]

The cables are the same. Pay the money for premade! Making cables is a pain. The cables rarely show up on ebay with the drives and if they are there, the drives always sell for more than $25. Hopefully, 8201 site will be back. Seems likely that it will be. One of the threads here talks about the reasons for the site being down.