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My friend’s dad has a CNC machine that requires floppy disks to load the design patterns. He’s worried that a mechanical failure of the disk drive will eventually be the end of it, rather than the machine itself being obsolete. It’s been going strong for almost 40 years now.

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purplemonkeymad@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Look for usb floppy emulators, you can have the floppy images in a usb flash drive. No moving parts or need to find expensive floppies.

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- Couldbealeotard@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  If this thing relies on floppy, I don’t imagine it would be USB compatible
  
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  - renormalizer@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    It’s reverse: you get a board that has a floppy interface on one side and a USB socket on the other. You plug in a USB drive and the board uses a file on the drive as the floppy disk. It’s a little less convenient because you have to deal with disk images but it works without moving parts.
    
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    Couldbealeotard@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    I see, like those car radio cassette to aux cable modules
    
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pyt0xic@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
It might be possible to buy an old floppy drive off ebay and switch out the broken one of that happens, as long as there are no proprietary connectors and such…

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- ASeriesOfPoorChoices@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Compaq would like a word.
  
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  - bufordt@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Ah yes, Compaq, the company that used non standard power supplies but with the standard wire coloring and connectors. I had several customers blow up their motherboards after buying standard replacement power supplies.
    
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grayman@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
GoTEK SFR1M44-U100 3.5 Inch 1.44MB USB SSD Floppy Drive Emulator Black a.co/d/hJwq736

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ICastFist@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Almost 40 years, so it’s been running since the 80s? Damn, older than Windows.

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