Small mod to the disk emulator board and work on the pirate ship bar

DIABLO EMULATOR VERSION OF ALTO DISK TOOL

Well, I discovered that the emulator board I built has a defect. It does NOT ground pin 21 of the FPGA connector, which it should to indicate to the logic that this is the emulator daughter board. I will add a short wire to fix the board.

Jumper added to ground pin 21, identifying this as an emulator board

I went through the logic and removed all the instrumentation/test related code from the VHDL - the buttons to trigger updates or writes from the test generator and the use of the sense switches to set seek addresses. A bit of other cleanup as well and it was ready to produce the version I will use for testing tomorrow on the Alto.

FUNDRAISER PROP - PIRATE SHIP BAR

I worked a bit on my gimmicks for the prop. I plan to have a lifesize photo of Johnny Depp's head as Cap Jack Sparrow pop up from behind the ship facade and bob back out of sight. I have the actuator and just received my 'head'.

Cardboard head to pop up (actually a flat mask

The cannons will flash with a 1200 lumen high intensity LED, which I tested at almost full power using my current limiting bench power supply. It is plenty bright even for daylight, mounted inside the cannon, and should be spectacular at night time when most of the fundraiser occurs.

My high intensity LED operating at about 70% of full power

I also received the fog generating fluid to put in the fog machine, which I fired up as a quick test of the volume and quality of the fog produced. It seems okay, but I am still figuring out the machine, whose output was a bit erratic. I will do more testing once the ship is built.