I continued to solder bulbs onto headers to use with my new PCBs, including one of the original size bulbs used by IBM in the 1130. It is possible that with great care I could use original size bulbs and get them to fit into the honeycomb blocks, but that won't be necessary if my newly ordered mini bulbs arrive from China.
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| Two mini bulbs and one original sized, installed on headers |
ALTO DISK TOOL
I made some adjustments to the logic related to when the new parallel word is prepared for access by the serializer, as it will be important to having the checksum written out properly. With these changes it appears I am writing the sector correctly.
The timing is still off, with the crystal on my board running 9+% slow. I bought some LVCMOS oscillator modules and stuck one on the board, but the clock did not run with it in place. A quick look at the documentation gave me the correct pin for that clock signal - U9 - and I reran the tool chain and tested again.
The error persisted, I dug deeper and found a spare cycle in my clock FSM. I fixed it. Measuring again, I found the inter-record time (from sync bit to next sync bit) to be 144, close enough to the 134.4 theoretical timing. I will put the clock module on the other two fpga boards so that they all run at the (same) intended speed.
Next up was a validation that the checksum is working properly. To address this, I set up a spreadsheet with the eight words of the label record and calculated the XOR of those with the seed value 0x0151. It came to 0xA32C
The value being emitted by the disk tool is 0xA32C so this is working well. I ran over to Marc's to give it one live trial before I leave tomorrow for the visit to the TechWorks museum in Binghamton, NY. The attempt to write an entire cartridge failed with an overrun error, where the write is still active when a sector mark arrives.
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