xum1541-II & opencbm

I saw a cool project a while back using the Rust programming language to interface with Commodore disk drives from a modern PC. The project was using the rs1541 crate to access OpenCBM. To do this, you need a converter / cable to connect Commodore’s serial bus to a modern USB port. There are several methods available to do this, but the most popular seems to be the XUM1541 or ZoomFloppy. These devices are available on ebay or Amazon for relatively cheap, but I found a git repo with an updated version called the XUM1541-II that looked good, so I had a few boards made up.

I ordered the boards from PCBWay along with some 6-pin DIN connectors. After a delay for Chinese New Year, they finally came in and I assembled one of the boards. I flashed the firmware on an Arduino Pro Micro and went looking for a Commodore drive.

The first Commodore drive I found in my stash was a 1571. I can’t remember the last time I used this drive and I wasn’t sure if it worked or not, but I figured I’d give it a shot.

I hunted around for some floppies, installed OpenCBM, and tested everything out and to my surprise everything worked first try.

The XUM1541 was detected after installing OpenCBM and the XUM1541 udev rules.

OpenCBM was then able to detect the drive and even list the contents of the disk.

I played around a bit more and was able to format disks and write D64 disk images as well.

Now that the hardware side of things work, I can start playing around with Rust.