The 1581 is a disk drive, for the Commodore 64 like no other. It was released in the summer of 1987 and sported a whopping 3160 blocks of storage on a 3.5" 800k floppy diskette.
With the prices and availability of original hardware becoming un-attainable for many people, the though behind this board is to allow people to make their own replica 1581 disk drive.
Working with PCBWay to produce the prototypes for this design, we came up with a design that incorporates all of the usual features of the 1581 board, but adds on an alternate power circuit. This circuit allows you to power your 1581 with any DC power supply between 7.5VDC and 25VDC. This is a milestone advancement in this board as you no longer need an original Commodore power supply to furnish power to the drive. From a build standpoint, that certainly drops the overall cost of the drive by 40-50 dollars given that most people have a spare "wallwart" power supply already that could be used to power it.
You can already purchase this board directly from PCBWay through our Shared Projects Page.
