I have "several" MC68HC11 chips which need to find a home on
a bare board. I've searched the 'net and can't seem to find
any still available. Does anyone here know of a source for
nice cheap bare boards? I'm aware of the "Handy Board" and
the MIT board, but they are too robotics-oriented.

Requirements:

	(1) very cheap (< $10 USD each)
	(2) small quantity (like 10 or so)
	(3) prefer no SMD, other than MAX232 below
	(4) socketed 68HC11A or 'E (this chip *not* surface mount)
		PLCC 52
	(5) SCI serial interface
	(6) prefer with RS232 on-board (MAX232,
		prefer this chip surface mount)
	(7) prefer ability to run expanded mode
	(8) prefer with some prototyping area, though
		this is less important
	(9) address decoders for 2x62256 RAM or RAM/ROM
		combo (if expanded mode capable)

If the board is not expanded mode capable, then it should
be <$5 USD per board.

The BotBoard 2 and BotBoard+ were some which came more or less
like what I want, but they are no longer available. I've hacked
a HandyBoard, but it took some serious hacking to make it like
what I wanted, as it's kinda dedicated. Most of the board is
still empty, and I had to add some off-board stuff for the
serial I/F. I also had to cut some traces and add other stuff
so it wouldn't run SPECIAL TEST but rather the normal expanded
MUX. It's also hard to take it above 32K RAM. So I really don't
like this board. I haven't used the MIT board (6.270), but it
looks even less like what I want, and even more robotics dedicated.

I realize that these are agressive requirements. OTOH, if the
MC68HC11 is really as dead as it appears to be, then there
ought to be a pile of such boards lying around somewhere looking
for a home as well.

Mike
-- 
p="p=%c%s%c;main(){printf(p,34,p,34);}";main(){printf(p,34,p,34);}
This message made from 100% recycled bits.
You have found the bank of Larn.
I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you.
I speak only for myself, and I am unanimous in that!

Mike McCarty wrote:
> I have "several" MC68HC11 chips which need to find a home on
> a bare board. I've searched the 'net and can't seem to find
> any still available. Does anyone here know of a source for
> nice cheap bare boards? I'm aware of the "Handy Board" and
> the MIT board, but they are too robotics-oriented.

Hello Mike,

There is another 68HC11 based board available but it is also
sort of robotics related.  I may be something you can work
with however.

http://www.1sorc.com/main/blanks.html

I've never used these yet myself but may try them out if I
need any more boards down the road.

I need to get back to a couple 68HC11 projects again myself.
A couple of the last ones included a fix for the HandyBoard
so the motor ports would not come up in an unknown state
and another to convert a BotBoard 2 to make it act like a
HandyBoard.  It made sense for me to just have all the
68HC11 boards act the same way.

Since there were quite a few robotics projects that used a
68HC11 CPU you may also want to post on COMP.ROBOTICS.MISC
and ask what 68HC11 boards have been made and see if anyone
there has some spares.

Good luck,

Robert
	

Tech Arts used to sell the adapt11 as a kit- maybe you could buy just 
the board
	Robert L. Doerr wrote:
> Mike McCarty wrote:
>   
>> I have "several" MC68HC11 chips which need to find a home on
>> a bare board. I've searched the 'net and can't seem to find
>> any still available. Does anyone here know of a source for
>> nice cheap bare boards? I'm aware of the "Handy Board" and
>> the MIT board, but they are too robotics-oriented.
>>     
>
> Hello Mike,
>
> There is another 68HC11 based board available but it is also
> sort of robotics related.  I may be something you can work
> with however.
>
> http://www.1sorc.com/main/blanks.html
>
> I've never used these yet myself but may try them out if I
> need any more boards down the road.
>
> I need to get back to a couple 68HC11 projects again myself.
> A couple of the last ones included a fix for the HandyBoard
> so the motor ports would not come up in an unknown state
> and another to convert a BotBoard 2 to make it act like a
> HandyBoard.  It made sense for me to just have all the
> 68HC11 boards act the same way.
>
> Since there were quite a few robotics projects that used a
> 68HC11 CPU you may also want to post on COMP.ROBOTICS.MISC
> and ask what 68HC11 boards have been made and see if anyone
> there has some spares.
>
> Good luck,
>
> Robert
>
>
>
>  
> Yahoo! Groups Links
>
>
>
>  
>
>
>
>
>
	-- 
Nigel Johnson
MSc., MIEEE, MCSE
VE3ID/G4AJQ

http://nigel.homelinux.net

You can reach me by voice on Skype:  TILBURY2591

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Robert L. Doerr wrote:
> Mike McCarty wrote:
> 
>>I have "several" MC68HC11 chips which need to find a home on
>>a bare board. I've searched the 'net and can't seem to find
>>any still available. Does anyone here know of a source for
>>nice cheap bare boards? I'm aware of the "Handy Board" and
>>the MIT board, but they are too robotics-oriented.
> 
> 
> Hello Mike,
> 
> There is another 68HC11 based board available but it is also
> sort of robotics related.  I may be something you can work
> with however.
> 
> http://www.1sorc.com/main/blanks.html
> 
> I've never used these yet myself but may try them out if I
> need any more boards down the road.

Thanks for that pointer. I tried to look before replying,
but my 'net access is S-L-O-W right now, so I can't really
look. Anyway, the $8 price for a bare board looks ballpark.

I have ADSL and my modem reports 1280 Kbps (downstream)
right now, but that page times out before it can completely
load. Maybe I'll try rebooting my ADSL modem.

[snip]

> and another to convert a BotBoard 2 to make it act like a
> HandyBoard.  It made sense for me to just have all the
> 68HC11 boards act the same way.

Yes, it does, but running in SPECIAL TEST mode is not the
common mode I would have chosen. :-)

I also don't like the memory decoding on that board. It
punches a bunch of holes in the memory map.

> Since there were quite a few robotics projects that used a
> 68HC11 CPU you may also want to post on COMP.ROBOTICS.MISC
> and ask what 68HC11 boards have been made and see if anyone
> there has some spares.

Nice idea. I just need to research how to access the newsgroups
from my machine.

Mike
-- 
p="p=%c%s%c;main(){printf(p,34,p,34);}";main(){printf(p,34,p,34);}
This message made from 100% recycled bits.
You have found the bank of Larn.
I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you.
I speak only for myself, and I am unanimous in that!

Robert L. Doerr wrote:
> Mike McCarty wrote:
> 
>>I have "several" MC68HC11 chips which need to find a home on
>>a bare board. I've searched the 'net and can't seem to find
>>any still available. Does anyone here know of a source for
>>nice cheap bare boards? I'm aware of the "Handy Board" and
>>the MIT board, but they are too robotics-oriented.
> 
> 
> Hello Mike,
> 
> There is another 68HC11 based board available but it is also
> sort of robotics related.  I may be something you can work
> with however.
> 
> http://www.1sorc.com/main/blanks.html

Well, after a modem reboot, things are better, and I can
look at that page.

Those look like well-made boards. However...

It looks like it needs both boards to run in an expanded
mode, so that's $16 for both. Also, they have the same run
modes as the HanyBoard, so they'd need the same hacking.
They also have the same address decoding problems the
HandyBoard has. In a way, it's unfortunate the HandyBoard
is so popular, because other people try to emulate it.

IOW, they are not general purpose boards, and would be
difficult to expand to run in normal mode with more than
32K of memory. Just the one board with no expansion is
getting close for single-chip, but misses the price
I wanted of <$5 USD for single chip. I'm really more
interested in expanded mode, also.

I'm probably really more looking for surplus type boards,
I guess. Being a laid off telecom engineer has its economic
implications :-)

Mike
-- 
p="p=%c%s%c;main(){printf(p,34,p,34);}";main(){printf(p,34,p,34);}
This message made from 100% recycled bits.
You have found the bank of Larn.
I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you.
I speak only for myself, and I am unanimous in that!

VE3ID wrote:
> Tech Arts used to sell the adapt11 as a kit- maybe you could buy just 
> the board

These boards look nice, and I've investigated them before. But
$49 CD (umm, about $42 USD) misses the mark for single-chip
mode. These boards cannot be run as expanded mode. They
can be jumpered that way, but no support circuitry is provided,
like address demux, location for RAM/ROM chip(s), address
decode, etc.

Mike
-- 
p="p=%c%s%c;main(){printf(p,34,p,34);}";main(){printf(p,34,p,34);}
This message made from 100% recycled bits.
You have found the bank of Larn.
I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you.
I speak only for myself, and I am unanimous in that!

Mike McCarty wrote:
>>and another to convert a BotBoard 2 to make it act like a
>>HandyBoard.  It made sense for me to just have all the
>>68HC11 boards act the same way.
> 
> Yes, it does, but running in SPECIAL TEST mode is not the
> common mode I would have chosen. :-)
> 
> I also don't like the memory decoding on that board. It
> punches a bunch of holes in the memory map.

Hello Mike,

It is a bit odd that the Special Test mode is used.  I can't
say that i'm an expert on all the modes of the 68HC11 as i'm
a more casual user of that chip.  For the project I was going
to use them on the Handyboard could use some more memory.  I
had worked most of the hardware design out but have yet to
build it.  Too many other things came up.  I'll get to it
eventually.

>>Since there were quite a few robotics projects that used a
>>68HC11 CPU you may also want to post on COMP.ROBOTICS.MISC
>>and ask what 68HC11 boards have been made and see if anyone
>>there has some spares.
> 
> Nice idea. I just need to research how to access the newsgroups
> from my machine.

If your ISP doesn't handle Newsgroups then you can sign up and
use them through google.  It's odd that they call them groups
instead of news but they still work.

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.robotics.misc?hl=en

http://groups.google.com/grphp?hl=en&tab=wg&q=

Best Regards,

Robert

Robert L. Doerr wrote:
> Mike McCarty wrote:
> 
>>>and another to convert a BotBoard 2 to make it act like a
>>>HandyBoard.  It made sense for me to just have all the
>>>68HC11 boards act the same way.
>>
>>Yes, it does, but running in SPECIAL TEST mode is not the
>>common mode I would have chosen. :-)
>>
>>I also don't like the memory decoding on that board. It
>>punches a bunch of holes in the memory map.
> 
> 
> Hello Mike,
> 
> It is a bit odd that the Special Test mode is used.  I can't

It makes it easy to take over the interrupt vectors without
having a firmware monitor on-board like BUFFALO.

[snip]
	> If your ISP doesn't handle Newsgroups then you can sign up and
> use them through google.  It's odd that they call them groups
> instead of news but they still work.

I don't know about my ISP not handling it, I don't know how to
use my browser for that. I use Mozilla on a Linux machine.
I'm sure there is a way to configure it to use Newsgroups,
but I just don't know what that is. I really don't like using
the web based e-mail and newsgroups browsers, but thanks
for the info.

I also don't like the idea of Google tracking what I'm doing.
I'm sure they sell that information...

Mike
-- 
p="p=%c%s%c;main(){printf(p,34,p,34);}";main(){printf(p,34,p,34);}
This message made from 100% recycled bits.
You have found the bank of Larn.
I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you.
I speak only for myself, and I am unanimous in that!

On Mon, 2006-03-06 at 17:46 -0600, Mike McCarty wrote:

> I don't know about my ISP not handling it, I don't know how to
> use my browser for that. I use Mozilla on a Linux machine.

  Thunderbird is the mail client to Mozilla - install that, set up
newsgroups.  You need a news server - your ISP or some other.  There's
not too many "free" ones as the (porn) traffic gets too heavy to provide
gratis.

Don't know how or what Google provides in this respect.  May investigate
- but maybe not just now ...

  You would appear to be answering private replies back to the list.
Not sure how ...
-- 
  Cheers,
    Paul B.
	

Paul B. Webster VK2BZC wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-03-06 at 17:46 -0600, Mike McCarty wrote:
> 
> 
>>I don't know about my ISP not handling it, I don't know how to
>>use my browser for that. I use Mozilla on a Linux machine.
> 
> 
>   Thunderbird is the mail client to Mozilla - install that, set up
> newsgroups.  You need a news server - your ISP or some other.  There's
> not too many "free" ones as the (porn) traffic gets too heavy to provide
> gratis.

This is getting off-topic, however, thanks. I use Thunderbird as my
mailer already. I'll investigate how to subscribe to newsgroups
using it.

> Don't know how or what Google provides in this respect.  May investigate
> - but maybe not just now ...
> 
>   You would appear to be answering private replies back to the list.
> Not sure how ...

Umm, no, I don't think so. The replies go to the "Reply-To:" field.
Your's for example, has that.

Mike
-- 
p="p=%c%s%c;main(){printf(p,34,p,34);}";main(){printf(p,34,p,34);}
This message made from 100% recycled bits.
You have found the bank of Larn.
I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you.
I speak only for myself, and I am unanimous in that!