Well, I should have guessed that, since programmable parts are probably not what
you'd choose for a job you're likely to have to maintain later. The
in-situ-programmability does make it pretty easy to maintain, though, and the
fact it's specified to drive 20 mA on each pin (though it clearly can't do that
on ALL its pins, makes it capable of driving the cable + terminations. If only
it were in an easier package to handle ...
I like building hardware too, but the hour or two that it would take for the
hardware, combined with the endless hours of fiddling with the software with
which to process the captured data sample, would make this less pleasant than
I'd prefer. I've got several old schematics for hard-sectored controllers based
on old I/O LSI's, e.g. a PIA and a sync-serial port, along with several
different schemes for responding to the index/sector pulses, all of which are
different, so I know it would be a fishing expedition, automated on the PC. One
of these schemes automatically inserted a sync character and 14 bytes of some
sync field into the stream each time a sector pulse was encountered. With such
irregularities, it has to be a mainly host-software task. The sampling hardware
is pretty simple, and even the firmware would be quite straightforward since the
MCU is so fast and the task so leisurely. The host-software, OTOH ...
Dick
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tony Duell" <ard_at_p850ug1.demon.co.uk>
To: <classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org>
Sent: Monday, September 10, 2001 4:32 PM
Subject: Re: Vector 3/Teledisk
> >
> > It looks like what's needed is to get someone who has both the resources and
the
> > need together with this task. I suggested a solution that requires a single
>
> Exactly... At the moment I don't have the need, but I do have a fair
> number of other projects to do. So I am not volunteering to take this one
> on...
>
> > chip + and oscillator + a single SIMM/SIPP, simply because fewer people seem
> > inclined to build hardware than to build software. Though I've had several
>
> As I have said many times I prefer to build hardware. So if I do this,
> it's likely to end up as a board of 'interesting' chips :-)
>
> -tony
>
>
Received on Mon Sep 10 2001 - 22:34:05 BST