Waiting on PCBs, refining retry logic while reading cartridges

ALTO DISK TOOL

Final components are on hand, now watching PCB move through the foundries. The driver PCB is currently being plated, presumably the next steps are creating the sandwich of layers and QA inspection before shipping. They estimate shipping by December 15th, with three day shipping in place, which means the boards likely arrive early next week.

Driver boards in process, arrive early next week

The single emulator board is assigned to a large panel to be manufactured. Once the entire 4 layer panel is built and cut apart to the separate boards, mine can be checked and shipped. This board will likely arrive late next week.

Digilent had an online sale, where I picked up both extension boards and FX2 connectors at a very attractive rate. These will allow me to build out all the boards I expect to make in the coming weeks.

Extension boards

FX2 connector to use in lieu of extension board

I tweaked the ReadEntireCartridge transaction to let me control the number of retries when a checksum error is detected. I can have none, 31 or 62 based on fpga board switch settings. I will run some experiments - seeing the number of error sectors with no retry, then assess the results of 31 or 62.

This afternoon, I ran those tests and see that very few are corrected by retry. Performing a single read across the entire cartridge resulted in 123 sectors with a checksum validation error. Whether retry was done for 31 or 62 times, we had 119 bad sectors. That is, only four sectors had temporary errors that were resolved by rereading. The bad sectors are extremely consistent from run to run, as well.

It is time to study failing sectors in more detail, to discover where the fault happens and the characteristics. If there is a pattern that I can detect and if a more intelligent data separator would avoid the fault, then I will build it.

To do separation, I must first OR together ReadClock and ReadData to give me the original combined pulse stream. That is simple to accomplish. Separating, depending on the full list of errors I find, might be a bit challenging but perfect extraction is the goal.