Oh, and the name I gave to this design is "Woolly". It would be the
Woolly board. :)
Ken
On 7/11/17 4:39 PM, Ken Pettit wrote:
Hi Philip,
It is possible. No wires needed, just plug in the module. I
developed a board for a client that has this much functionality on it
and it is small enough that the user wears it under their foot (along
with a big battery and charger coil). The solution I am thinking
about would use 0.4mm CSP (Chip Scale Package) type devices that are
7x7mm, 8x8mm, etc.
The way it would achive this with no wires soldered is that the
low-power FPGA would use edges on the ALE pin to detect the timing of
the bus. Then it would monitor the AD0-7 / ALE traffic and "track"
the CPU's instruction flow. This is a simple lookup table of the
number of bytes fetched per instruction. Then for any instruction
where the processor is performing a WRITE or OUT operation while the
OptROM CS is active, the FPGA will fill-in the missing WR signal. It
would respond to I/O requests in the 0x30-0x3F range to provide a type
of disk I/O functionality. At least this is my idea.
This is a board I have wanted to develop for a long time (independent
of M100 use) as a general purpose FPGA + microcontroller board. There
are a lot of FPGA boards on the market, but none that really have what
I want and all of them are for evaluation, and not really small enough
to be used as a final product. The goal would be to make the module
fit in OptROM form factor with a PCB outline that causes the router to
cut through the 28-pin thru-holes. Then for general purpose, the
outline is a bit bigger and the module plugs into a standard white
breadboard. For general purpose, it could be sold to a MUCH LARGER
market, meaning development cost could be recooped.
I *believe* all of this will fit. The main thing I am trying to
figure out is the WiFi. I believe it can fit also, but that soluion
would need two boards stacked with very low-profile connectors (which
I have also used before). The past couple of years, I have been
specializing in small form factor electronics for a client (under the
foot, worn on the wrist, etc.).
Ken
On 7/11/17 4:07 PM, Philip Avery wrote:
Great Ken.
Changing thread to "CP/M Expander"
Is it really possible to fit all that on OptROM form factor? Would it
need a heap of wires soldered to motherboard?
Philip
On 12/07/2017 7:14 AM, Ken Pettit wrote:
Downloaded the remem.bin file and ran CP/M under VT 1.7 on Linux.
Works great!
Now I just need to get my super-cool OptROM form-factor FPGA +
Microcontroller + SRAM + WiFi + Flash board I want to build done.
So much to do ... so little time.
Ken
On 7/8/17 8:28 PM, John R. Hogerhuis wrote:
Files are hosted.
http://bitchin100.com/files/m10x/mtcpm/remem.bin
http://bitchin100.com/files/m10x/mtcpm/Instructions%20for%20M100%20CPM%20v1.0.pdf
I just need to make a page for it or replace the contents of the
MTCPM wiki page.
-- John.
