The humongous Sandy Electronics thread...

[Dave]

Since this proposed USB would always be in a system that had solid state storage, I think the look-up table issue isn't really a problem - the table only needs to be examined when a device is plugged in, after all.

Don't get hung up on DMA. Get hung up on what's needed after that. We'll do what we can, and try to use a controller that offloads as much work from the CPU as possible.

[Dave]

Today's activities:

The package didn't come yet again today, but my mailman said there's a large truck of undelivered mail that all came in one go this morning, that had been held up by the unusual seasonal weather the last few days. Looks like tomorrow then! If not, I'll have to go down to TechShop and print/assemble a few to fulfill the existing orders, before I go away for 10 days.

I made busy in the meantime by making myself some developer and etchant for prototyping.

My developer is Sodium Hydroxide. It's nasty stuff so I keep it in a little dark glass bottle when it's not in use.

My etchant is 10% Hydrochloric Acid, 2% Hydrogen Peroxide and 88% water, heated to 40C. It's quite gentle, and a lot less toxic for the environment than Ferric Chloride. Etching takes about 10-15 minutes. As a slower process, it's also much more controllable and works well for finer details.

I made a couple of prototype power supplies. I have thoroughly tested the design, but the test boards were tested to destruction. These boards will be used while prototyping the early stages of UltimIDE and UltraQ, in place of the bench PSU. It seems sensible to do it that way. Anyhow, while doing these I tried a couple of different designs to use the fill as a heatsink, and found one definitely worked better than the other. I think now that I'll do a few Q-Regulator "beta" prototypes and get them in use with a few QLers. This'll get me some feedback, but it will hopefully also get me an impartial review or two. They'd be designed to screw right onto the post where the current heatsink goes.

I am considering making some QL prototyping expansion cards that contain a power supply - 7805 or switch mode, a decoder and ROM socket, plus a large prototyping area. It might encourage people to make their own expansions. If anyone prototypes anything great, it could well be manufactured!

If there's any serious interest expressed here for the prototyping boards idea, I'll try to match it up with my own needs and put an order in. The idea I have is for the first 3cm to be occupied by a socketed GAL decoder, DIP switches so you can select the location of the prototype card (up to four cards in one system), a DIP EPROM slot, a 100 x 70 mm array of through holes on a 0.1" spacing, a +5v and GND track, a jumper set at the end for connecting breadboards... Down one side there'd be an assortment of SOIC pads with breakouts... Anyone interested in something like that? I'm also considering doing them for more popular platforms (but those would be for profit) like the Amiga, C64, Spectrum, etc. I am open to ideas. I have this great facility here and if I can put a little time into making better use of it, it could completely fund all the QL work

Today I also breadboarded a bit more of UltimIDE. I burned the prototype ROM image and it is being recognized by the QL, so that's good, but there's a LOT more work to do. Most of that work is awaiting a couple of parts.

I have bought all the shrouded IDE connectors I need - I got them with black shrouds - they look great next to a QL.

Also, yesterday I ordered some test samples of a new 3D printing material that I might be able to use to print some replacement ZX Printer belts for RWAP. As anyone who has them know, they go all sticky and crumbly and fall apart. The working ZX Printer is a rare one. Hopefully, with some new belts available, we'll be able to restore a lot of dead ones to working condition. There's definitely a demand for it.

Still waiting on just two minor parts (resistors and one IC) then I can start mailing out Minerva MK IIs.

All in all, a productive day in both activity and in ideas and thinking....

[Dave]

Hi all,

I have returned from my 4,212 mile road trip to visit Tim Swenson in California. Good weather, good music and lots of hardware. I got home at 2am a couple of days ago, and spent a day recovering.

I opened a few packages I was waiting for, but one still hasn't arrived yet. I still need just one part to complete the Minerva boards. It's driving me crazy - two have already sold and I would really like to get them shipped as soon as possible.

I will start shipping out the battery adaptors this week. I mailed one to myself and it came back to me with a bent bin, so I have had to revise the packaging slightly. I'll post some photos today or tomorrow.

I am also almost done working through 140 or so microdrives for Rich at RWAP. It's taken about 8 hours so far - another 2 hours and they'll be ready to ship on Monday too.

One fun aspect I have been dealing with is that I often need to be able to copy GALs or PALs to reproduce some hardware. I have a very generic EPROM programmer and software. If anyone has any suggestions on better software that can work out the programming of GALs and PALs that is better than what I have, I'd love to hear about it. What I have doesn't always get it right.

I am making progress on UltimIDE - slower than I'd like mostly due to learning a different PCB design package. I have found myself in an interesting place where I have designed a QL prototyping card: It has a good power regulator on it, decoding for the EPROM and a socket, and brings everything else out for easy linking to prototype boards. I will probably make a few more of these than I need - they're a great prototyping and break-out platform for the QL.

Because of the way PCB manufacturing orders are processed, it's quite easy for me to have multiple boards made on a single sheet then separate them later for the same cost. If anyone out there has any interesting schematics that would make a good QL addition (relay control boards, A-D or D-A boards, etc) get in touch!

Back to the microdrives, and waiting for the mailman.

[prime]

H
One fun aspect I have been dealing with is that I often need to be able to copy GALs or PALs to reproduce some hardware. I have a very generic EPROM programmer and software. If anyone has any suggestions on better software that can work out the programming of GALs and PALs that is better than what I have, I'd love to hear about it. What I have doesn't always get it right.

Dunno what OS you are running your machine under but if it's Windows XP or later then I have had good results with the Wellon VP-590, I also know a few people that have the VP-290 which is cheaper but less feature rich. The entire series uses the same software however, you can download the software to try it out from the Wellon site http://www.weilei.com as it will work in demo mode if you don't have a programmer.

Cheers.

Phill.

[Dave]

Thanks for the heads-up, Phill.

[belg4rion67]

Thanks for the heads-up, Phill.

hi Dave, for my little experiment with eprom programming I use a galep-5 universal device programmer by conitech: see this http://www.conitec.com/english/galep5.php, easy to use and works fine with xp, win 7 both 32 and 64 bit version
cheers
Paolo

[Dave]

Yay! I have now shipped out well over 1,000 microdrive pads. Who knew there were so many microdrives still in use?

I just shipped the cartridges back to Rich, and he will also have 100 pads for sale when the package arrives.

[Dave]

I did a new blog post at: http://sinclairql.com/wp/

[RWAP]

Great - some new 768K expansions (not 896K until you count in the QL's internal memory) would be ideal and as you say could breathe new life into some of the older disk interfaces.

Could I ask for the ability to add an EPROM with Toolkit II on it on the board, which would provide 99.5% of the functionality of a Trump Card then if you had an old simple disk interface. Remember that there are not many EPROM cards left out there for plugging in the ROM expansion slot, so people need a way of running Toolkit II from EPROM (yes, I know they can load it into memory from disk, but that is not the same, as it does not provide the timing required for the enhanced network capabilities of the EPROM version).

So what is the 0.5% of the Trump Card's facilities which would be missing?

The ability to do a quick FORMAT ram1_mdv1 to make a fast dump of a microdrive to ram disk....

[Ralf R.]

The ability to do a quick FORMAT ram1_mdv1 to make a fast dump of a microdrive to ram disk....

But that is a function of RAMPRT.