Progress: Pictures !!!

Here are two pictures of an early prototype.

The red LED in the corner beside the IDE connector is a harddisk activity indicator. The IDE connector is just like you'd find on a PC motherboard, it connects to the hard disk drive with a straight 40-pin ribbon cable.

The power connector fits a standard PC Power supply.

The RS-232 port (no handshake lines, just Transmit, Receive and Ground) is a 9-pin female connector

The IEEE-488 connector hooks up to the PET/CBM, of course. It is just like the connectors on the back of an 8050 floppy disk drive or similar.

Progress (not): PCBs are buggy

Yikes... The PCBs are buggy. Not a manufacturing fault, more driver error: One row of GPIB connector pins got mirrored, the other row is connected all wrong to the driver chips. Also, an input connected to an input, 2 data lines got flipped on the IDE data port... I hope the next batch turns out better...

Progress: More things set up

Finally managed to hook up the microcontroller programmer to the development workstation (Win 2K) but it just wasn't working... Finally gave it a try on my GPIB Analyzer workstation (Windows 3.11) and no problems there. I guess some part of the programming software can't deal with today's serial-ports, who knows. Anyway, that meant I had to hook the analyzer workstation onto the LAN, which meant I had to find a stone-age network card. Thankfully I'm one of those people that never throws anything out, not even old 16-bit ISA Intel Pro network cards. Managed to get it to run under Windows 3.11 and that workstation is now on the LAN.

I also started assembling the first prototype PCB. I managed to stack the ZIF socket for the CPU inside a standard PLCC socket. Just a few more components to solder in, and it's done. I noticed one misplaced fill on the PCB that would cause the IDE's busy-LED to not work unless fixed. Nothing that can't be fixed by scraping off some copper from the board.

I'll be posting some pictures soon.

Progress: PCBs arrived !

The first batch of printed circuit boards arrived today. These are prototype boards, so they don't have soldermask or legend on it (I simply put the legend on the top layer). Everything fits fine, except the CPU ZIF socket for use during development... Gotta figure something out there !