Hardware Project (redesign update)

["Terence J. Boldt" <apple2@cgocable.net>]

For those of you who were following along with my ProDOS compatible
ROMDrive, a few things have happened since I last posted a few months ago.
I finished a complete PCB layout ready for production (and then re-did the
layout two more times to make it cleaner).  It still worried me that the
prototype had a very high failure rate.  This week I started more or less
from scratch with the design using what I learned from the first project.  I
built a prototype (on solderless breadboard) last night and it works
flawlessly.  I have booted it 30 ~ 40 times at least without a single
failure.  It gets recognized as a regular ProDOS volume and is fully
bootable.  It now has less chips and theoretically supports drives from 32KB
up to 1 MB but my EPROM programmer only supports up to 27C040 (512KB).  So
far I've only tested a 64 KB drive.  Again, the estimated cost to produce 5
~ 10 boards will be about $75 Cdn. each.  Hopefully I'll get around to
having the PCB's made up in a month or two.  Let me know if you're
interested or if you have any comments.

--
Terence J. Boldt
Oakville, Ontario, Canada
mailto://apple2@cgocable.net
http://www.cgocable.net/~apple2