My take on this is if you need to cut costs, the 10-cent microcontroller is definitely the way to go. It's quite amazing how much compute capability this thing has for the price.
For me, though, I like having the ability to remotely login thru VNC using WiFi, use my favorite pile of free Linux tools, and code-up all sorts of diagnostic checks and error-logging. It's definitely more costly (Raspberry Pi Zero W is now 15 USD....if you can find any, plus the cost of the microSD card and cabling/connectors), but I dont have to worry about how many kBytes of code get generated, and there is a decent amount of RAM (at least 148Mbytes free on the system running my b7971 clock) . BTW, the 7971 clk code was written in C, takes 25KB for the executable, and uses 0.3% of the RAM. No worries about a "1202 Program Alarm". On Monday, May 8, 2023 at 6:12:38 PM UTC-7 Terry Kennedy wrote: > On Monday, May 8, 2023 at 6:56:33 PM UTC-4 Mac Doktor wrote: > > I recall reading on multiple occasions that a SCSI driver was a > non-trivial exercise. Sort-of like "if you don't appreciate how non-trivial > it is don't even bother". > > > Yup. It was bad enough when there was an actual controller chip, but at > least the chip handled some of the handshaking internally. Doing it with > parallel ports alone was *quite* exciting. Fortunately the original design > only needed* to support the Xebec S1410 SASI/ST-506 bridge. Even that was > fraught with peril - the SyQuest SQ306 drive used a servo "wedge", so an > incautious format operation would destroy** the cartridge servo information > and render the cartridge unusable. To make matters worse, the field test > drives had matching cartridges - interchange between drives didn't yet > work. Ah, the bad old days... > > * Of course, right after release a customer showed up wanting to use a > tape drive > ** Xebec eventually released a new S1410 firmware EPROM that prevented > this - if you happened to have a controller with that EPROM (it wasn't the > default) > > My company had lots of experience with oddball storage - we had a Vertimag > 5MB(ish) floppy disk prototype. And I was involved with the Evotek ET-5540 > disk drive. That was "interesting", but that's a story for another time. We > eventually went with CDC Wren drives. DEC (Evotek's other large OEM > customer) had a bit more inertia and had to scramble for available drives - > that's why the DEC RD52 might be a Quantum Q540 (more common) or an Atasi > 3046 (rather rare). > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to neonixie-l+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/ea835cf3-dbb8-40ca-9724-50b55eabebaen%40googlegroups.com.
