Dave, That's all very nice and would be an absolutely fantastic piece of hardware but it's very complex and likely to be expensive. I would have thought that a better use of the development cost and time would be an FPGA-based QL clone running at 80MHZ with 1GB RAM and onboard USB3, SATA and HDMI.
SPI otoh is a very simple protocol and the only hardware needed are four I/O lines for Clock, In, Out and Slave Select. When I finally get some time I will look at the spare I/O provided on the superHermes to see if that could be used for this purpose. Adrian -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Dave Park Sent: 12 March 2011 01:57 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Ql-Users] Ser-USB on Minerva On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 7:32 PM, Adrian Ives <[email protected]> wrote: > Yes please. I'll do the driver. :) > > How about a board that plugs into the ROM port and has the necessary > logic to implement the four wire SPI interface for a single slave > device (namely the USBWiz). The board would also have a header socket > to mount the USBWiz module on. > > Job done. When you say ROM port I brace myself. Knowing the trickery involved in getting the RomDisq to work and the addressing gymnastics required... The hardware and driver need to be developed hand-in-hand. I'd rather work on a standard expansion card that could take submitted multiple interfaces from many people and implement them in a single board. I was thinking of it having some flash for ROM images, two daisy-chained SPI ports, two "proper" serial ports from a MAX232, 16 buffered/registered GPIO lines, an SDHC port/socket - things like that. Also, it could have a large flash bank on it, access through a mild hackery of the RomDisq driver, etc... People could buy the basic PCB, then simply add those interfaces they need... This is a project I plan to begin when I have a suitable venue for a hardware forum. (If one isn't available soon, I may install phpBB and start one myself)... I look at things like this and suddenly feel very naive... Dave _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
