Go. Go. Go. Gotek!

In my last big order from a ubiquitous Chinese e-commerce site, I ordered FIVE Gotek drives, earmarked for a variety of systems, including my Amiga 1200 (when it gets built), my Amiga 600 and the Atari STᴱ.

OMG GOTEK! (And OLED and Rotary Encoder)

I had a cunning plan, and one of the reasons I’ve been so quiet recently was that I’ve been working on the plan.

You see, one of the things I don’t like with the Gotek is, by default, it has only got a 3×7 segment display, and a pair of buttons to run things. I wanted upgrades in the form of a nice big OLED display and a rotary dial. But where to put them? When I’d been working on the Archimedes, I’d had the clever idea to mount the screen on a cable, and that seemed to work well. I wanted to take that to the next level, so I’d been thinking about the design for a while.

The old version. It worked…

The long linear connector of the design for the Archimedes took up space and was not very elegant. A better design was needed. I knew I only needed 7 wires.

“Seven you say? Surely the rotary encoder needs 5 and the OLED needs 4. Isn’t that nine?”
Aha! you’ve been fooled! The GND and +3.3V pins are shared between the Rotary encoder and the OLED, and the Rotary encoder actually only needs 4 pins not 5.

I decided on using a DuPont connector for the computers and Pin Header for the OLED Display. I settled on a pin being removed to make sure the connector couldn’t be plugged in backwards and from there a 2×4 row of pins was the logical size.

I sat down with the Wiki and carefully plotted out my pins. Then I looked at them again and rearranged the pins completely to be more logical 😀

Trust me! These are all you need!

Grabbing out the crimper I made up the socket in about 40 minutes. Note to self, next time use multicoloured “rainbow” wires. They’re a lot easier to keep track of what pin goes where.

It took me 3 goes to get all the pins in the right place.

At this point I made the other half. This consisted, on the connector side, of some experimenter’s board, some pin header and a zip tie for strain relief. I soldered on some nice flexible 8 core cable and soldered on the OLED and rotary encoder to the other end.

At this point I tested everything and it worked as planned.

I’d already flashed the Goteks with FlashFloppy, but I needed to get some more pin header, with 2 rows and a right angle, as if the pins stick straight up, you can’t close the case. A quick trip to Altronics fixed that. Now the connectors could lie flat inside the case.

Next I 3D printed two different styles of bracket (one for the Amiga 600 and one for the STᴱ to hold the DuPont connectors in place. A dab of super glue and the whole things were done on the computer side.

Atari STe with the connector in the LCD slot.
FF for Flash Floppy modified. The thing on the top is a pizeo speaker for the drive click.

Next up I printed up a nice case for the OLED and the Rotary dial. It’s almost good enough for release. I need to tweak some dimensions but it still looks good.

I’m happy with the 3D printer.

Finally, having accidentally shorted two wires and severed a third, I resoldered the connector, covered it in hot glue, then a piece of cloth that I’d impregnated with hot glue, then finally gently heated the whole thing so everything hot glue bonded together. THis gives me an incredibly strong connector I can easily remove.

Surprisingly practical.

I’m very happy with this!

Works on Amigas too!

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