"starter kits" disposition

rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> wrote:

(snip, I wrote)

>> I might try to make my own board, and will have to figure 
> out all those.
 
> Why, what is your purpose?

Hardware emulation of older computers.

I want a nice simple board, FPGA, serial port, keyboard, VGA,
maybe a little more.  

-- glen

On 12/8/2014 12:50 AM, glen herrmannsfeldt wrote:
> rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> (snip, I wrote)
>
>>> I might try to make my own board, and will have to figure
>> out all those.
>
>> Why, what is your purpose?
>
> Hardware emulation of older computers.
>
> I want a nice simple board, FPGA, serial port, keyboard, VGA,
> maybe a little more.

I am certain you can find that in an existing board somewhere.  What 
keyboard interface?  These days they are all USB.

-- 

Rick

glen herrmannsfeldt <gah@ugcs.caltech.edu> writes:
> Hardware emulation of older computers.
> I want a nice simple board, FPGA, serial port, keyboard, VGA,
> maybe a little more.  

Can't understand the purpose of this.  Software emulations these days
even on weak hosts (Raspberry Pi etc) are much faster than the old
hardware ever was.

On Sun, 07 Dec 2014 13:47:00 -0600
Tim Wescott <tim@seemywebsite.com> wrote:

> On Sun, 07 Dec 2014 04:03:13 -0500, rickman wrote:
> 
> > On 12/7/2014 3:03 AM, Tim Wescott wrote:
> >> On Sat, 06 Dec 2014 23:35:18 -0700, Don Y wrote:
> >>
> >>> Hi,
> >>>
> >>> What do folks do with "starter kits" they no longer use? Repurpose
> >>> them for "little projects" (like what?)?  Salvage components from
> >>> them?  Toss them out?  etc.
> >>
> >> I have a special shelf for them, where they sit around because they're
> >> too valuable to throw away, and too useless to, well, use.
> >>
> >> I think I have them going all the way back to an ADSP2105, if not a
> >> MC6811F1 (with BUFFALO, whatever the hell that is).
> > 
> > Same with me.  I actually seldom use them for much other than trying the
> > tools and getting my feet wet.  The ones that are low cost are usually
> > too simple to do much with and the ones that are useful I usually don't
> > buy because they are too expensive.  Some of the FPGA manufacturer's
> > eval boards are the highest priced!  Often over $500 or a grand.  Even
> > the DSP boards have come down in price enough to be practical...
> > usually.
> 
> I probably have about a 20% hit rate of actually building a circuit 
> around a starter kit.  Even then, half the time the starter kit is 
> sitting on my bench with a bunch of flying wires off to a protoboard, and 
> it all gets torn apart when there's either a working circuit board or the 
> customer abandons the project.
> 
> As soon as I feel I can trust a chip, it becomes more economical to just 
> design revision 0 of the board.  If the customer hasn't nailed down their 
> requirements yet it may end up being a subset of the final product, but 
> at least it'll be representative of whatever that subset is.
> 
> For that matter, the last Cortex M board I built was for a new-to-me 
> manufacturer (NXP) and a new-to-me chip (obviously) that I just built 
> from the data sheet because I knew the debugging interface would work.  
> It did, the board works, and it was all with a minimum of muss, fuss, or 
> bother.
> 
> -- 
> www.wescottdesign.com

Same.  The top shelf in the lab, the one you can't get to without
either the ladder or monkey climbing, has all the old dev kits next to
the box marked "Power Supplies of Limited Utility".

I like them for an opportunity to try the tools out before I get too
deeply committed, but generally once I can blink an LED and _maybe_
testdrive the one or two wacky on-chip peripherals I'm feeling dubious
about.  But I'd never dream of trying to put together any substantial
portion of my circuit against one.

Relatedly, I've never bought any of those expansion boards that let you
connect some specific ADC/transceiver/explosive device to the
proprietary connector on the dev kit.

-- 
Rob Gaddi, Highland Technology -- www.highlandtechnology.com
Email address domain is currently out of order.  See above to fix.

Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> wrote:

(snip, I wrote)

>> Hardware emulation of older computers.
>> I want a nice simple board, FPGA, serial port, keyboard, VGA,
>> maybe a little more.  
 
> Can't understand the purpose of this.  Software emulations these days
> even on weak hosts (Raspberry Pi etc) are much faster than the old
> hardware ever was.

It is, but it isn't the same thing.

For one, what is the software emulation of a 1024 bit shift register?

Yes, you don't need one, but if you want one ....

-- glen

On 12/8/2014 6:52 PM, glen herrmannsfeldt wrote:
> Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> wrote:
>
> (snip, I wrote)
>
>>> Hardware emulation of older computers.
>>> I want a nice simple board, FPGA, serial port, keyboard, VGA,
>>> maybe a little more.
>
>> Can't understand the purpose of this.  Software emulations these days
>> even on weak hosts (Raspberry Pi etc) are much faster than the old
>> hardware ever was.
>
> It is, but it isn't the same thing.
>
> For one, what is the software emulation of a 1024 bit shift register?
>
> Yes, you don't need one, but if you want one ....

Easy to emulate in software.  1024 bit shift register is implemented in 
software by a 128 byte array.  Rather than moving the data in the bits a 
pointer to the byte and bit in the byte are maintained and incremented. 
  Much less power consumption too.  :)

-- 

Rick