The Sinclair QL Forum

RWAP wrote:[...] although it would be interesting to see whether an Aurora may impact on this at all.

I'm also curious, because the Aurora offers much better signal quality than the QL mainboard.

RWAP wrote:There is also the question of THOR / Q40 / Q60 users - and whether any of the options will work on those machines, or maybe something could be born out of a QL design.

The only option for Q40/Q60 at the moment is a parallel port SD card adaptor which I designed, but only have as a sample. The same adaptor should work with the SGC parallel port.

Dave wrote:I have done an SPI link that was 120cm long with ribbon cable based on a 20MHz signal. No problems.

I think you will be fine for any cable length that could reasonably fit inside even a large tower case.

Nice of you to offer support for people having problems with long spi cables
I have been sailing a 22 feet sailing boat from Dover via Calais to Zeebrugge nonstop at a speed more than 15 nautical miles (the sumlog couldn't show more) all the time. Surfing all the time.
But I do not recommend this
Kind regards
Paul

Sorry to all. The last post is not the style it should be and is not helpful.
Electrically spoken there is no reason why a cable of 3-5m length should not work under ideal conditions.
Speaking about distortions , those will definitely increase, but this is very dependent on the conditions around.
Safest thing to do is making a cable just as long as necessary and test it under life conditions.
How good are the power supplies? Hard disks?

As an issue 5 QL is quite "noisy" I will try a long cable in a issue 5 QL going over the chips several times to simulate plenty of distortions.
I hope I know more then.
Kind regards
Paul

The cable should not be too bad, because every second line is ground, which allows defined impedance. However, SDHC cards differ in driver strength, so I really have no idea which length is possible.

An interesting entry on the SD theme



http://sinclairqles.wordpress.com/2014/ ... icrodrive/

from this blog

http://sinclairqles.wordpress.com/

That looks like the one gertk did, which he discussed on here last year.

It connects to the mdv expansion slot right side of the QL and works by making mdv images. The point of interest according to the blog is that as it appears to the system as a Microdrive, it probably doesn't need additional driver software.

However, if that's true, it wouldn't be a true directory device in the sense that what you would have is a multitude of small Microdrive images, rather than a single large storage medium.

I must admit, I would prefer one of these to an internal sd card system. I like the idea of an external system, perhaps housed in a zx microdrive unit?

This is the threat: http://theqlforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=584

There are currently three QLSD available on sell my retro.
Kind regards
Paul

I got one!