Today I worked on the connector from the ATX PC power supply to the driver board of the disk tool, or alternatively a direct wired cable from the power supply to the board. I went with a modification of the cable I had been connecting via wire nuts, but soldered everything to a 4 pin connector. It has an indicator light, the load power resistor and the connector to fit to my PCB.
Power is good, so I proceeded to power on testing. I had mixed results from the first test, other than it passed the magic smoke and hot component tests. I could set up and accomplish seeks, although this worked with or without the SelectUnit1 line activated which is NOT what should happen.
The drive should ignore all signals unless SelectUnit1 is pulled to ground and while it is ignoring incoming signals, it should not drive any return signals to the PCB. Instead, I see status, sector marks, sector numbers and other signals driven regardless of my Select slide switch.
Seeks worked, but no response to a ReadSector or ReadEntireCartridge transaction. Time to do a few things before I proceed:
- Verify that SelectUnit1 is switchable and not permanently on from the fpga
- Verify that the terminator has the pull up and pull down resistors installed for all the signal lines I am driving, but none on the lines returning from the Diablo to my fpga.
- Monitor signals incoming to the PCB to validate their correctness
- Monitor signals at the terminator when my PCB is driving the Diablo to validate their correctness.
Step 1 yielded the insight that I had changed the logic in the fpga to hold SelectUnit1 on, thus the behavior was what should be expected. Eventually, this will be switched off except for the duration of transactions, but during testing it is easier if I can observe ReadData, ReadClock, SectorMark and other signals all the time.
I began looking at the terminator resistors and cross checking it all to the schematics and design of my board. I didn't complete this before my shipment of the emulator board PCB blank arrived.
In addition, my emulator role PCB arrived today and I began to assemble components on it. It is time consuming due to the small size of the parts. The resistors and capacitors are size 0805, one of which is held in tweezer tips in the photo below, on lined writing pad paper with one line visible for scale.
I ran out of the header strips I need to mount the last two components, each a level shifting mini-board that connects 3.3V and 5V sides for four circuits each. Once these come in, I can test out the wiring of the board prior to firing it up to test the disk emulator role.
As you can see, the disk driver and disk emulator boards are fairly similar in overall appearance, but are quite different in details. They are electronically keyed, using pins 20 and 21 of the fpga, so that when the board is connected, the fpga logic knows whether it is operating in emulator or driver mode by which of the pins are grounded.
I began looking at the terminator resistors and cross checking it all to the schematics and design of my board. I didn't complete this before my shipment of the emulator board PCB blank arrived.
In addition, my emulator role PCB arrived today and I began to assemble components on it. It is time consuming due to the small size of the parts. The resistors and capacitors are size 0805, one of which is held in tweezer tips in the photo below, on lined writing pad paper with one line visible for scale.
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| 0805 size component on lined paper, in tweezer tips |
As you can see, the disk driver and disk emulator boards are fairly similar in overall appearance, but are quite different in details. They are electronically keyed, using pins 20 and 21 of the fpga, so that when the board is connected, the fpga logic knows whether it is operating in emulator or driver mode by which of the pins are grounded.
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| disk emulator role board, assembled but for two level shifter miniboards |
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