20 Oct
2006
20 Oct
'06
12:24 p.m.
Jeff Walther wrote:
Hmm, well a CF card should plug right into that given a suitable socket, no?
That might be an interesting way of providing the storage area for a disk
image as it's non-volatile; in the future someone could add a standalone
interface to the gadget and it wouldn't even need the controlling machine
until data needed to be downloaded.
How useful that is I don't know - and I think a truly portable device is well
beyond an initial version anyway - but maybe CF is easier to interface to than
lots of memory (with associated refresh issues) anyway?
Probably use
something a bit more common, say an ARM? Not that I
have anything against a Z80 (or Z180, or EZ80). Just that extra
horsepower can be very nice, even if you don't need it right away.
They're a bit more expensive (about $5 in quantity) but the MC9S12UF32
looks interesting. It has a built-in USB interface (in addition to the
SCI serial interface) and a built-in ATA-5 interface. I'm not sure what
one would use the latter for in this application It would require considerably more software
development, but another
interesting possibility might be to have an ethernet interface and build
the disk drive as a network storage/reading device. The MC9S12NE64 has
an ethernet MAC and EPHY built-in as well as the more common SCI.
I'm certainly much more in favour of Ethernet than I am USB. I can't help
thinking we'd be reinventing the wheel with Ethernet development; surely there
are several single-board type devices out there for which people have
developed network stacks already? Maybe some of them are even free to use...
cheers
Jules