brew-your-own-unibus boards?

From: Brad Parker <brad_at_heeltoe.com>
Date: Mon Jan 19 15:24:20 2004

der Mouse wrote:
...
>Once, years ago, I was involved in building a designed-on-the-spot Qbus
>board.

Which raises a question I've been meaning to ask.

Has anyone made their own unibus boards? Is this fool-hearty?

I have half a mind to look over the "IDE for Soviet unibus" zip file I
found and make my own uniboard board with a modern day CPLD and IDE
interface.

How crazy is that?

I have 4-8 layer PCB's fabricated regularly and have a reasonable CAD
setup to do that, so design, layout & fabrication is not a problem, nor
is TTL design (heh, especially at unibus speeds :-) And I write VHDL for
CPLD's all the time and program them.

Seems like a 4 layer board with gold fingers would work - the few boards
I've handled seemed pretty thick, however. I'm guessing the thickness
needs to be correct.

I have not (yet) looked at a unibus card schematic - would be it hard to
create a bus master IDE interface?

Is a unibus controller a relatively straight forward TTL design ?

I should probably ask on the PUP list also, but I thougth I'd see if
anyone here has opinions.

And, if I did manage to create a realiable IDE interface, would anyone
else want one?

(I realize cost would be the overriding factor - believe it or not on
small runs like I do the PCB is by far the most expensive part)

-brad
Received on Mon Jan 19 2004 - 15:24:20 GMT