• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Apple II Prototyping Edge Connector

glitch

glitch

Veteran Member
Joined
Feb 1, 2010
Messages
5,051
Location
Central VA
I'm currently epoxying a bit of an old ISA card to a piece of perfboard so that I can do some Apple II prototyping. As I was cutting the edge connector off the ISA card, I had an idea: I could create a little board with a 50-pin edge connector, mounting holes, and plate-through holes on 0.1" centers that could be bolted to a piece of perfboard and used for Apple II prototyping, since old cards are expensive.

Anyone interested in buying some of these? I won't bother with them unless there's a community need, as chopping broken ISA cards works fine for me!
 
I bought some cheap a few months back, I can't remember from where, but was looking for ISA perf board at the time. Might not be a need to roll our own if these still exist.
Kipp
 
kyeakel said:
I bought some cheap a few months back, I can't remember from where, but was looking for ISA perf board at the time. Might not be a need to roll our own if these still exist.
Kipp
Click to expand...

Definitely let us know if stocks still exist, especially cheaply -- the epoxied connector works pretty well, but I'd certainly rather have a card that my IIe's lid will fit over!
 
Heh. I've always just chopped the edges off other boards too. I usually save junk boards with full compliments of edge fingers for this purpose (most ISA sound cards and modems don't have all the fingers populated). The AST cards tend to have all their fingers, as well as a dual row of holes on .1 centers connected to them. When cuttng the fingers off, be sure to leave extra space around it, you want a couple of screws to really anchor it to the board.

It would be handy to have generic sets of bolt-onnable fingers for various purposes (Apple II, ISA, etc), as pad-per-hole perf board is pretty cheap, but proto boards are hard to get and expensive. In the arcade world, there exists something called a "fingerboard", which is just a strip of circuit board with card edge fingers on it. They're usually 56 pins (28 pins long, double sided), and are .156 spaced. The fingers are long, much longer than needed to insert into the connector, so that wires can be soldered to the board. They're used for building wiring adapters to plug incompatible game boards into other cabinets. They're not gold plated, but something like that would be useful - just a long row of fingers, so you could cut to whatever length you need. Might be harder to bolt onto boards though - although it would be flexible.

-Ian
 
Exactly...my idea was to create something like a JAMMA board, but on 0.1" centers. I don't suppose it would be much hassle to just create one for the longest common 0.1" connector (ISA?) and cut or snap them to desired length for use with various other architectures.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top