Re: Any CBM equipment standard components?

Jim Brain wrote:
David Murray wrote:
Well, the reason I ask this is not so much for some kind of
preservation effort. Just I think it would be good for people to have
a design where they could make their own custom 8-bit systems out of
off the shelf components. I've explored this before about a year ago

What would be the eventual goal? Designing a system is not trivial, even a minimal 8 bitter with CPU, SRAM and EPROM. Just the wiring alone can be unwieldy. Diagnosing a bare system that won't boot is a sure way to waste a weekend. We used to do it because there was no other alternative in the hobbyist space, but my 68HC11 and WDC65XX dev boards now sit gathering dust on the shelf here. AVRs, PICs, and Ubicom SX's fill the space quite nicely, with flash (no EPROMs to program or erase) and all matter of I/O on-chip.

I think AVRs and such are a neat way to flex your hardware muscle. Sure, they don't give as much "bragging rights" as rolling your own from scratch, but I've been there, done that, and I have no need to do it again.

As well, if you get on the AVR/PIC/SX wagon, there's a ton of these tiny projects that scream to be built. If you're daring and want to go FPGA, there's even more projects to implement.

Atmel sells the AVR Butterfly evaluation board for only $20 (http://www.atmel.com/dyn/products/tools_card.asp?tool_id=3146). It has not only an AVRmega169 microcontroller with all kinds of digital and analog I/O, but also a small alphanumeric LCD display, light and temperature sensors, a little speaker, 4 Mbit flash and has an RS-232 port which can be used to program this little piece of kit. IHMO a great way to get started with this kind of stuff.
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Relevant Pages

  • Re: Any CBM equipment standard components?
    ... a design where they could make their own custom 8-bit systems out of ... Designing a system is not trivial, even a minimal 8 bitter with CPU, SRAM and EPROM. ... We used to do it because there was no other alternative in the hobbyist space, but my 68HC11 and WDC65XX dev boards now sit gathering dust on the shelf here. ... AVRs, PICs, and Ubicom SX's fill the space quite nicely, with flash and all matter of I/O on-chip. ...
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