Greaseweazle
More info
- Creator
- Keir Fraser
- Type
- USB flux reader
- Source
- github.com/keirf/greaseweazle
A cheap, open USB board that reads and writes floppies at the flux level – a KryoFlux for people who'd rather not pay for a KryoFlux.
Keir Fraser, who also wrote the FlashFloppy firmware for the Gotek, built Greaseweazle in the late 2010s around an inexpensive STM32 microcontroller. It sits between a standard PC floppy drive and USB and captures the raw flux transitions instead of decoded sectors, so copy protection, odd formats and half-dead disks all come along for the ride.
The host software is written in Python and saves to formats such as SCP and HFE, or decodes straight to ADF and friends. With both hardware and code open, anyone can build one, which turned flux-level imaging from something only archive projects could afford into something hobbyists do at the kitchen table. It can also write images back to real disks.