PCB status and other stuff

[lynchaj <lyn...@yahoo.com>]

Hi All!  Well its been a busy last few days!

I've had a recent surge of orders and find that I am now almost out of
ECB prototyping boards, ECB bus monitors, and Disk IO boards.  I have
LOTS of SBC and about a dozen ECB backplane PCBs left.  I am
reordering from the manufacturer the ECB prototyping boards, ECB bus
monitors, and Disk IO PCBs.  They should be here soon.

Over the last few days I have been busy working on the N8VEM 6809 host
processor.  It boots from the ROM and the next project is to write a
debug monitor.  The first attempt will be the Motorola MIKBUG or
MINIBUG.  Probably will move to SBUG later on but I need to get
something working first.

Tonight I finished wire-wrapping the second prototype for the XT-IDE
board for the people on VCF.  Tomorrow I'll finish the wring out and
test.  With some luck that prototype will work and then I'll send it
off to BIOS writer and that project will go on hold while he does a
bunch of BIOS test analyze and fix cycles.

The good news is the Zilog Peripherals board is getting ready, I
think.  Tonight I checked and it was at 83 remaining vias and ~565
inches of overall trace length.  That's quite an improvement since the
original PCB had like 320 vias and over 600" of overall trace length.
Its a nice looking PCB and I think the trace optimization should be
done soon and then I'll make a manufacturing order.

As for the future PCBs, the next one will be the Zilog Peripherals,
then I'll design and order an ECB bus extender board.  I'll make a
design and send it out for comment as soon as I get a chance.  Next
will be the 6809 host processor PCB.

Probably the next project after that will be one I've wanted to do for
quite some time.  It will be a SY6545 VDU board.  I am thinking of
adding a 8255 so it can also have a PS/2 keyboard interface like
James's.  Probably this will be an old school terminal board which
means 2K SRAM character mode only but it will be a great addition to
the N8VEM system to have a real VDU and keyboard.

After that, who knows but I am sure more things will appear.  Dave is
working on a Propeller board which looks really interesting too so I
am looking forward to that.

If anyone has comments or questions please reply here and let me know
your thoughts.

Thanks and have a nice day!

Andrew Lynch, 73 de N8VEM