ATAExplorer

From neurotica.com

ATA/Explorer is a very simple ATA (IDE) disk exploration tool. It's basically a board with an ATA interface on one side and a serial port on the other. You connect an ATA drive and a terminal (or a computer running a terminal emulator program) to it, and you can interact with the drive...read its identification and firmware revision strings, its geometry, and read/dump raw data from the disk. If the connected drive has a PC-style Master Boot Record (MBR), it can parse and dump its contents as well.

This project was built as a tool to help me learn how to interface with ATA disk drives from a microcontroller. It has enabled me to design a simple I2C-interfaced ATA controller which I can use as a "canned" component in other projects. Best of all, it was cheap, fun, and educational to do, and only took an afternoon to design and construct, and a few days (not full time days of course) of hacking to get the code working.

The processor is a Philps P89C664 (a modern implementation of the 8051 architecture) and the code was developed in C using the SDCC cross compiler under UNIX.

I am considering making the ATA/Explorer design available for folks who want to learn more about how easy it is to interface ATA/IDE disk drives to microcontrollers. Email me if you're interested...if there is enough interest I will set up some pages detailing the hardware & firmware design.

Photos

The completed unit.

Running ATA/Explorer with a terminal.