A couple of Months ago, I bought an Amiga 500 Case from a1200.net

Not having any Amiga 500 internal components (keyboard, mainboard) this was already decided to be a new Raspberry Pi Project.
Earlier I already succesfully made an ‘Pimiga 600’, but without a floppydrive. Unfortunately I always missed the numeric Keypad.

Since my main Amiga 1200 is in a towercase, I have a spare Amiga 1200 keyboard. Which kinda fits into an A500 case.

Components used:

Amiga 500 Ultra Case (A1200.net)
Keyrah V3 by Indivision Comp. (to make the A1200 Keyboard an USB keyboard)
Greaseweazle V4 – To turn the floppydrive into an USB floppy drive
Raspberry Pi4

2* USB cable to panelmount USB
1* Ethernet to RJ45 Panelmount
1* USBC to USB panelmount (todo)
1* USB to USB-A (to connect Greaseweazle)
1* Straight floppycable (couldn’t find a twisted one)
1* Floppy Drive (PC: Samsung FD321) (not modified)
1* Mini-Molex cable, male-male
1* MicroSD ‘extender’

Raspberry Pi4

This is a Raspberry Pi4B. The MicroSD is installed with Chris Edwards’ Pimiga (which has Amiberry (important!).
The Raspberry Pi4 is placed where there  is space after installing the other components. The Amiga 500 Case has mounting holes for a Raspberry Pi, but as you will see later, it can’t be put where the mounting holes are.

Keyrah V3

The Keyrah has a flatcable connection and 2 DB9 connectors. The flatcable from the A1200 keyboard is pretty short and you don’t want to start twisting it.
This means that the Keyrah goes right on top of the mounting holes that were made for the Raspberry Pi.
To secure the Keyrah, I drilled small holes to put hex bolts in. Like the one you would find on a VGA connector at the back of a graphics card. Actually the ones I used ARE from a videocard.
The keyrah is now firmly attached to the back of the A500 case.

Assorted cables

I ordered a connection kit along with the A500 case. Which includes USB, HDMI, Ethernet cables with decent enough length and panel connectors.
The case also comes with some seperate plastic replacement slots for the left and right side of the Amiga.
The right side slot comes in a version that has space for the HDMI, USB, USB and MicroD extender.
All cables are fitted into the slots and then into the raspberry Pi.

A bit of fiddling around with placement and I’ve decided that the best place for the Raspberry Pi, would be just next to the Keyrah

Floppy Drive and Greasweazle

The case has one standoff for the floppydrive, which is not exactly the right place for it. But you can’t hang the floppydrive on just one standoff.
Online I found mountingbrackets and had those 3D printed.

3D Printable Commodore Amiga 500 PC Floppy Mount and Eject Button by Stingu Ciprian 

As I’m writing this and trying to find the 3D prints i used, I found Amiga 500 Gotek mount by j-j-b – Thingiverse which might also work?
As for the floppydrive itself. It’s a standard Samsung SFD-321B. With standard, I mean that I didn’t modify the electronics of it. I succesfully modified another one from PC to Amiga, but for this build I just went with a new unmodified one.
Unmodified apart for the Floppy Eject Button ofcourse. The Floppy Eject button the drive has, doesn’t line up with the hole in the Amiga 500 case. So I found this:
Amiga 500 Floppy Button for Samsung SFD-321B by OlsenG – Thingiverse

Only one is needed, but the price wasn’t too high and those clips seemed very fragile (they aren’t, but spares are good!)

The drive put together with new Eject button and supports. The Amiga 500 case has holes that line up with the supports, in which i while place M3 screws that are 20mm long.
So from the outside and bottom of the case, through the support feet and into the drive.
The support that is already in the case, will get a few washers in between the support and the drive to keep it in place.

 

The greaseweazle is a handy device that turns any floppydrive into an USB drive. (and so much more).
For my purposes, I want to read Amiga disks on Amiberry (the Amiga emulator most Pi retromachines use).
Since Amiberry is running on the Raspberry Pi and the Pi only has USB ports and is also most definitely not an Amiga. The Greaseweazle really comes in handy.

I bought 2 Greasweazles in the last years. The V4 version comes in a printed case, all packed up by Sordan.ie.

Greaseweazle 4.1

The V4.1 I bought seperately from Amigastore.eu. As I already have an external floppycase that fits a floppydrive and was made for the V4.1, I went for the V4 version and kept that one in its small case too.

To me the logical place of the greaseweazle was on the left side of the Keyrah. There was still space there and Floppy cables are hard to come by.
I used a straight floppycable (35PIN) for this as I could not find a twisted one in the length i wanted and without the 5.25″ connector.
PC drives used twisted cables and Amiga floppydrive cables are straight. Fortunately I can fix this later in Amiberry.

A pretty long mini-molex cable goes from the Floppy to the Greaseweazle to power the drive

Everything put together, time to test! The photo shows an Amiga 600 LED board. This is because the whole Keyrah+Pi+LED comes from the Amiga600Pi I made earlier.

After booting Pimiga. First problem is apparent. We need the F12 key to enter the Amiberry GUI!
I plugged in an USB keyboard to get there and changed the F12 key to F10 (probably not the smartest idea, since WHDLoad uses it too, so I will change this later).
After configuring. The Amiga 1200 keyboard instantly works, great!

In Amiberry, we now configure the greasweazle by going to the drive options and selecting Drawbridge on DF0:
Since we don’t have a twisted floppycable, I select drive B

Let’s test this! My original Covert Action disk 1 goes into the floppy drive and a short while later, the disk shows up.

For now, I’m not done yet. The LED board needs to go to the Amiga 1200 LED board. Which gave me some headscratches, because an Amiga 1200 has 3 LEDs, but the Amiga500 only has 2.