Prototype #3?

m00dawg · Post by **m00dawg** » Sun Jul 11, 2021 8:01 pm

Paging @Kevin Williams!

Heya! Sorry to be that guy, but not all of us use FB for whatever reason. I heard the 3rd prototype board has been announced over on the FB discussion board. Any chance the passionate and devoted fan base here can get some info on it as well? I've only heard about it second hand but would love to get the deets from the source!

x16tial · Post by **x16tial** » Sun Jul 11, 2021 10:49 pm

Yeah, I second that. Shouldn't this board really be the primary source of info about the X16, and Facebook secondary? Facebook doesn't like me, and the feeling is very mutual.

EMwhite · Post by **EMwhite** » Sun Jul 11, 2021 11:07 pm

Kevin posted this on Facebook (to which 66 comments were added; combination of smartest-people-in-the-room and snark); see images which I pasted below:

He said:

Hey everyone, Prototype #3 PCBs have been ordered! This board incorporates all of the fixes made to the second board, with some circuitry simplification, and the other changes I dicussed in past posts. I had been holding off for awhile as we may yet use a microcontroller for PS/2 Mouse and Keyboard control if using the 6522 doesn't pan out. I had already added an ATTiny84 to control power on/off & reset, so I moved to an ATTINY861 on this board to add enough legs for the PS/2 ports. I then added jumpers so we can select either one for testing. This will be removed from the final board, but I did try to get the layout closer to what I feel the final will look like.

Other changes include:

I moved from a 50 pin edge connector to a 60 pin! I was not a fan of using a 50 pin port as I was afraid folks might confuse it for an Apple II slot. Likewise, the 62 pin port is the same as an ISA card. Now, little to nothing that makes any sense will fit and I was able to add a few more pins from the CPU to the bus.

This PCB is 4-Layer. I did this for a few reasons, but the primary was hoping to keep the noise level IE, RF emissions as low as possible. It now has a proper ground-plane and while the PCB cost does go up a bit in low quantity, it's not actually too bad once you start looking at 100+ PCBs.

Took a wild stab at adding some EMI protection on the PS/2 and IEC port. Also added resettable fuses to main PCB to limit current flow.

Scott Robison · Post by **Scott Robison** » Sun Jul 11, 2021 11:37 pm

I can't find a place for the Heisenberg compensator on the new motherboard. Perhaps a fourth prototype... ?

SlithyMatt · Post by **SlithyMatt** » Mon Jul 12, 2021 3:22 am

3 hours ago, Scott Robison said:

I can't find a place for the Heisenberg compensator on the new motherboard. Perhaps a fourth prototype... ?

He tried to add it, but the flux capacitor kept leaking.

x16tial · Post by **x16tial** » Mon Jul 12, 2021 3:41 am

I would still like to know why this isn't the primary location for X16 info. Facebook is Draconian in their account rules and fast and loose with that data once they have it. I refuse. But if it's just me, so be it, but pretty disappointing.

Scott Robison · Post by **Scott Robison** » Mon Jul 12, 2021 5:03 am

1 hour ago, SlithyMatt said:

He tried to add it, but the flux capacitor kept leaking.

WTF? (What The Flux ... see what I did there?) I slay me...

VincentF · Post by **VincentF** » Mon Jul 12, 2021 7:21 am

3 hours ago, x16tial said:

I would still like to know why this isn't the primary location for X16 info. Facebook is Draconian in their account rules and fast and loose with that data once they have it. I refuse. But if it's just me, so be it, but pretty disappointing.

Fun fact : I had a FB account some time ago, just for reading feeds. This account has been deleted because it was blank and I only used it a a way to read stuff. They wanted me to fill some personal info, which I refused.

I'm talking to whoever wants to make a news feed for a project : please consider social networks as closed circles. Your news will mostly be enclosed behind a login wall. Use a publicly accessible channel instead and relay the link to it into social networks.

Note : for new projects I agree social networks can push them to be popular, but when the amount of interested people grow, keep in mind that some of them may want to read you in an anonymous way.

/Out of subject

(Please see this comment above as plain info)

About this thread in particular : Sometimes people just want to share some info on the go and later make an official post about it. It's how I interpret this message here and I don't mind waiting a bit to get the news about it. Else like here some kind people will share these posts on this forum ?

BruceMcF · Post by **BruceMcF** » Mon Jul 12, 2021 8:10 am

47 minutes ago, VincentF said:

About this thread in particular : Sometimes people just want to share some info on the go and later make an official post about it. It's how I interpret this message here and I don't mind waiting a bit to get the news about it. Else like here some kind people will share these posts on this forum ?

Yes, I was a little disappointed it did not show up here, but what I really want to show up here is a detailed description of the new expansion card format, and that post did not have many technical details.

EMwhite · Post by **EMwhite** » Tue Jul 13, 2021 5:28 am

Similar story. I joined Facebook for discount codes at FrontPanelExpress and joined Twitter for the Orion mission (the capsule was tweeting as it traversed space... seemed like a good idea at the time as I sat in Florida between watching launch and seeing the telecast of splashdown).

My wife is not happy that I never connected with her on FB or LinkedIn for that matter but frankly, I can't be bothered.

The development of Petscii Robots suffered an ironic but similar twist... a Facebook group was extremely active and some segment jumped over to Slack for a while. In the end, unless you spend all day every day checking every outlet (some people have time for this), you're going to miss out. I'd rather spend time in what I consider to be the official source. Oh, that and complaining : )

I consider this the X16 home but disappointed that days later, nothing has been posted about Proto #3.

Having said this, my experience with Kevin is that he works extremely hard on this and his other projects, and like Stefany from Foenix, does not spend time putting a social media presence together. He has put a few very good video updates but they are few and far between. We all want more and want to see this thing released.

Considering the price of prototype boards, I'm starting to get concerned about the cost and considering the time it's been taking to get something viable, the irrational side of me just wants a board with some parts on it that works and I'll manage to wire up a power supply and turn it off when I'm done the old fashioned way. At this point a light switch in a blue plastic Home Depot old work box will do. I don't care much about power management; just want a working unit. Waaaa...