The humongous Sandy Electronics thread...

[Dave]

Another photo.

This is the final design battery adaptor fitted to a Gold Card. The Super Gold Card has more room, but the Gold Card provides the tightest fit. This is because the PLCC sockets on many of these have bowed out edges that intrude on the battery's personal space. Anyhow, everything fits and is within the maximum dimensions allowed. No case clashes here, thanks to the low-profile battery holder's design. The plastic 3D printed overlay provides a way to handle the board, plus some physical protection and reinforcement for the four legs.

There will only ever be 100 of these made. I have spent well over $1000 developing them and they have gone through three major design revisions in two years. Some will be translucent red, some black - I cannot promise people will get a specific colour, but if you request a specific colour I will do my best to give you what you want. Personally, I like the black.

Enjoy.

Sandy 40LF220 Battery Adaptor, Gothic edition

[1024MAK]

Now where is that "like" button when you need it?

Nice job there Dave

How much development costs

I'm not fussed on the colour for the three that I have ordered. But with a $1000 development cost I did wonder if there was a gold plated version

Mark

[Dave]

The battery adapter is, in fact, gold plated.

Thanks

[Dave]

This evening's work has taken two different branches from the usual.

In the haul of retired QL gear I recently collected from San Francisco were two printers: a Sinclair QL printer, and a ZX printer.

The ZX Printer is a mate to the one Rich sent me to investigate printing replacement rubber belts for them - a task that is in progress. However, the printer he sent me is in working condition, so I have been loath to disassemble it. I took some apart as a teenager, but have little detailed memory of the contents 30+ years later.

I have simply studied the mechanism through gaps in the case. The donated printer had a sticker on it saying "not working" so I felt a greater freedom to pull it apart. The belt inside it was gooey and crispy at the same time - as they usually were even back then. I washed it, which was enough to break it. I am already confident the custom 3D printing material I bought will be able to make these. I have a file that describes the dimensions of the part very well. In the coming days, we will make a file so it can be printed in a 3D rubber printer using Ninjaflex - a selected material that seems ideal.

The other printer is a Sinclair QL badged Seikosha SP1000 clone. Alas, this printer has some problems. A pin on the print-head is stuck, there's a loose piece of metal rattling around inside it, and the whole frame of the printer seems to be twisted very slightly - possibly from being stored on things, with other things on top of it, for many years. One corner of the bottom case is slightly cracked.

Given the sentimental value of it being a Sinclair QL printer - with serial number 0200054 - I have bought a working Seikosha SP1000 on eBay, which will act as a donor machine to replace the head, ribbon and bottom case of the QL printer. That may mean, essentially, unscrewing the QL top case, and taking the ROM, and applying them to the working Seikosha. I already have matched paint which is indistinguishable from "QL ABS black" so I should be able to prime and paint the bottom case half such that nobody notices without closer inspection. Anyhow, I'll do my best to keep as much of the machine as original as possible.

There is also a QL monitor of some notoriety. It works perfectly, although I did have to adjust the image slightly.

So, that was my evening. How was yours?

[Dave]

My Macbook Pro came with two 750GB internal drives. One failed almost immediately, and the other started showing SMART errors. I took to having daily images of my drive copied to an external USB2 drive as a precaution. Eventually, the second drive died too.

So, for several months I have been running my laptop from a slow external USB2 drive, with both OS X and the windows virtual machine crawling along. Average access speeds: 12MB/sec.

Last night, my external hard drive threw a wobbly. My accounting-skills wife points out the cost of not fixing the problem is higher than the cost of a new hard drive. I took some proceeds from sales and bought a 500GB Samsung 840 EVO SSD and a 1TB laptop drive. When I install them in the MBP, I will create a "Fusion Drive" - they will be treated as a single volume. It's not RAID. The system stores frequently accessed files on the SSD and uses it as a storage buffer to maximise speed, but it shuffles large, rarely used files off to the HD. If it detects either is failing, it shuffles everything to the other drive and warns you. To the user, everything seems at SSD speed, so it's like a smarter, better hybrid drive. It is a bit over the top, but I will not have to deal with hard drives or storage issues again for the life of this laptop, hopefully.

A special thank you to Tim for donating spare (non-QL) hardware which helped substantially pay for this.

[prime]

Dave,

Apologies if this has already been mentioned.....

This occurred to me last night, for the RAM mod you talk about shadowing the standard 128K for reads, but not writes. You may be able to get away with shadowing writes for everything but the screen. You would of course need to know if the second screen was enabled by Minerva but that should just be a matter of checking the position of the sysvars.

if sysvars @ $28000 then
shadow starts at $28000
else
shadow starts at $30000

So basically the base of the sysvars

You'd maybe need a latched bit that was written to to enable the write caching for the $28000-$30000 area and a little utility to put in boot that checks the sysvar location and enables the shadow if only one screen is being used.

Cheers.

Phill.

[Dave]

Good catch. I'll pass this on to Nasta and see if we can do it.

Thank you

[Dave]

I've taken some time out from working on SuperRAM to resolve my hard drive woes for once and for all. I bought a 500GB SSD and installed it in my laptop. After two bouts of copying data over USB (five hours) I now have a spritely, quick booting, feisty laptop back, with super fast storage.

Now, back to SuperRAM.

Nasta has made a tweak to the design. We have swapped the GAL16V8 for a GAL20V8. This will allow us to add a couple of new features. One of the features was requested by Rich at RWAP - a memory cut feature that lets you easily restore the QL to 128K. Rich finds that many games and utilities from the earlier years of the QL require an unexpanded machine to run.

The other neat thing is that the SuperRAM is a power-sipper. We think, in 128K shadow mode, the QL will actually draw slightly less power at the wall than when using the internal DRAM.

I cut up my prototype PCBs with a tile saw. What do you use?

[1024MAK]

I cut up my prototype PCBs with a tile saw. What do you use?

FR2 SRBP (Synthetic Resin Bonded Paper) board or FR4 epoxy glass fibre board?

If you score it right, SRBP will snap along the score, if not you end up with a jigsaw

FR4 epoxy glass fibre, I cut with a saw. Size of cut and size of board determines which saw I use. For small boards/small cuts, a junior or normal size hacksaw.

Mark

[tofro]

Small proxxon electric table saw

or the mill, if I'm doing isolation milling.

Tobias