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Re: Carte Blanche arrives!



Nick Westgate wrote:
On Sep 20, 1:23 am, Steven Hirsch <snhir...@gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks to Steve and Alex for all the work that went into these.  They look...
gorgeous.

In light of a very unpleasant experience earlier this summer (in a different
classic computer domain), I am particularly impressed that they were
professional enough not to request or accept pre-payments or to make any hard
commitments on ship dates.

I got mine just the other day and had time to check it out.
Ditto the above comment about the great work on this card.

Just wanted to post a note though about the power problem which
had me puzzled until I emailed Steve, who replied quickly with a
very helpful email.

If you're short on time like me - and you only read the usage
guide, not the flashing guide etc - note that in addition to the
4 voltage LEDs there is a "DONE" LED which lights up after the
FPGA is successfully programmed on start up.

If the "done" LED doesn't light it's probably a power ramp-up
problem, and you'll have to remove other cards, try a different
machine, or re-cap or otherwise renovate your power supply.

Would it be possible to just hold off card initialization for a
few more milliseconds, after voltages have stabilized?

The card must sense that it has been powered on by sampling some
voltage.  If that sensing were delayed with a capacitor, by the
time it senses that power is applied, it will be stable.

-michael

NadaNet 3.0 for Apple II parallel computing!
Home page:  http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon/

"The wastebasket is our most important design
tool--and it's seriously underused."