14 Mar
2007
14 Mar
'07
11:32 p.m.
From: "Ethan Dicks" <ethan.dicks at gmail.com>
Sure, and there are a few tactile switches on the board (and of course
a boatload of potential input pins).
I have my XESS board plugged into a breadboard, which keeps the pins
off the table, and makes room for a MAX232, some caps and resistors,
and a DE-9 connector for the serial link. It's powered by a regulated
5V brick from JameCo. (Other boards might well come with the MAX232.)
It shouldn't take much external stuff, as the outputs are LSTTL
compatible, and the inputs nearly so (but mine are not 5V tolerant).
I also ran the LEDs in a binary clock off the outputs without problems,
with just current limit resistors in the common row paths.
But I basically agree with the $220-$250 estimate. It isn't too
hard to burn an extra $20 here or there, by the time you added a
brick, a nice box, etc.
Vince
On 3/14/07, Vincent Slyngstad <vrs at msn.com>
wrote:
http://www.jkearney.com/sbc6120/
Sure enough, there is a GPL version of the VHDL for the VT52 there.
Looking
at an IOB6120, that's clearly no stretch (and the VHDL is
already in there for a VT52 w/PS/2 and VGA ;-)
Cool! I should go look at that :). Well,
there's 16Mbit of flash and 256Mbit of SDRAM in mine.
Hmm... seems like enough to load several implementations at once (like
multiple Wyse or multiple VT100-family terminals) - just build in some
way to switch models... Well, I think
I paid about $200 for mine, but OTOH, it seems like it
would pretty much do the job, right out of the box. (Except for the
"small matter" of programming.)
Programming doesn't cost the second user anything ;-)
Hmm... $200 for an assembled board with those characteristics doesn't
sound _too_ bad, but there's still the matter of buffers/drivers for
off-board I/O with TTL-ish devices, plus connector cost - I can see it
running closer to $220-$250 for something that's ready to program and
use. That might be in the acceptable range for a number of folks.