New batch of pdp8 OMNIBUS to USB interface! Please Read and react!

[Philipp Hachtmann]

On 02/17/2017 01:02 AM, Jay Jaeger wrote:
> First of all THANKS. I hope this works out.
?!?

> It looks like you have a JTAG connector on there - please keep that.
Of course - it's needed for initial programming.

> The CPLD you had on the last board, XC9572XL is a bit long in the tooth,
> perhaps?   Would you expect to use that one again, or a newer chip?
I will use it again. It was already old when I decided to use it. It has 
5V tolerant inputs.

> An area with place to mount, say, a 40 pin header (2x20) or the like, on
> one edge of the board, with a set of places where one could jumper those
> pins to a set of I/O pins of the CPLD/FPGA would be really cool.
As far as I just remember, there are no substantial IO pins left.
And there is no FPGA.

> A spot where one could mount an Arduino compatible shield - again with
> no actual connections, but a place where one could jumper them to some
> I/O pins on the CPLD/FPGA might be really cool.  (e.g., using the CPLD
> to run an SPI bus connection to a shield).
No support for Arduino. Unter no circumstanced. I really don't like 
Arduino except for:

- I can get extremely cheap AVR boards ("nano") for arbitrary use.

- Young people stay on the surface of microcontroller programming. So 
there is less professional competition.


> In short, ways that folks could take your basic board and make it
> possible to do other things with it could increase the value of the
> board enormously.
Probably. But I want to create/use/provide a simple tool that does 
exactly one thing perfectly.

> You might consider KiCAD as an alternative to Eagle.  It works pretty
> darned well.
Why should I? If you look at the board's size you probably see that it 
cannot be made using the free version. I own a paid Eagle 7 license. Why 
should I throw that away? Started to use Eagle as a child. Have my own 
libraries and footprints. Got used to the odds. And I won't use that 
KiCAD thing. It smells too much like dumb Arduino folks. And I do not 
want to share to much with that community.
I am an engineer and no Arduino fool... Even if KiCAD was a really great 
program, it would still have the smell of the 
copy-and-paste-maker-arduino-blinky-blinky-community.

Sorry for the rant but....  Arduino is just fubar..

If I would migrate to another EDA tool, I would probably migrate up to 
something more elaborated than Eagle or KiCAD :-)


Kind regards

Philipp