flash (or ide) storage for unibus 11?

[Noel Chiappa]

    > From: Phil Budne

    > Any plans to allow USB "target" (as opposed to "host" -- I dunno if
    > those are the correct terms)

'host' and 'device' are the two modes for USB, IIRC.

    > to allow the board to be connected to a modern computer as a
    > peripheral?

Not sure I see the purpose? Any of the storage devices (SD card, or thumb
drive) can of course be pulled out and plugged into another machine.


    > From: Andrea

    > there's always the possibility to choose a commercial development
    > board, and mount it as SOM over a larger board that would include only
    > psu and bus level translators. This way could be cheaper

That's basically what we're doing for the prototypes, except that our
prototype motherboard is wire-wrapped. The mobo (currently) has only i) bus
transceivers, ii) level converters from +5V logic to +3.3V (nobody supports
+5V in any modern FPGA part, and QBUS transceivers are pretty much only
available in +5V - although we'd be happy to be informed otherwise), and iii)
a pair of 64-pin DuPont connectors to a FPGA/uC board from ZTEX.

(We may add more, e.g. when we get to debugging the indicator panels, we'll
probably put the drivers on the prototype motherboard. Etc, etc. That's part
of the reason for going with wire-wrap, it's easy to add stuff like that.)

It is, alas, not that cheap overall. We think the production models, with all
the circuity on a single custom PCB, will be somewhat cheaper. In addition,
you can't really stack the ZTEX boards on another board, and meet the QBUS
inter-board spacing.

	Noel