8 Dec
2005
8 Dec
'05
5:56 p.m.
On Mon, 5 Dec 2005 18:55:58 -0800 (PST)
Chris M <chrism3667 at yahoo.com> wrote:
Nice acquisition. Vesta also designed the 80188 based
robot brain from Radio Electronics circa 1987. I was
successful in obtaining the FORTH and BASIC/BIOS rom
images (theyre still around). It took 2 tries. It pays
to be persistent. I dont imagine your kit came with
the circuit board artwork? And is there a floppy
interface (if so, which chip?).
No, it is a very plain SBC. It has I/O ports made with standard
20-pin TTL gates and a National Semicondutor A/D converter
(ADC0809). It has no storage or 'advanced' IO. It has four open
ROM sockets, though, and you can burn EPROMs right on the board.
The console for the BASIC interpreter is a serial port.
With it's all off-the-shelf parts, I plan to use it as a launching
pad for further development (and yes, I _am_ slowly clearing the
piles of equipment and making my way to the electronics bench over
thar across the room)
The only 'key' component in it is the on-ROM BASIC firmware. I
will need to communicate with Vesta before giving that out. If I
do and they are agreeable I can and will share the ROM image and
schematics. It's a simple two-layer design and there's no reason
in the world why it couldn't be reproduced. If I get serious I'll
want to clone an augmented/expandable version of it anyway.