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Anyone Selling XT-IDE Cards?

Oh, super awesome! I didn't see your post as it wasn't there when I hit reply yesterday! I'll add your diagrams to the GitHub repo, and include them in my writeup. They are correct, but you might add the external IDE activity LED jumper, if you don't think that's self-explanatory enough.
 
glitch said:
Oh, super awesome! I didn't see your post as it wasn't there when I hit reply yesterday! I'll add your diagrams to the GitHub repo, and include them in my writeup. They are correct, but you might add the external IDE activity LED jumper, if you don't think that's self-explanatory enough.
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I think it would be a wonderful add on product if there isn't one already; both a half height or full height faceplate kit to go with a card such as this?
 
lyonadmiral said:
I think it would be a wonderful add on product if there isn't one already; both a half height or full height faceplate kit to go with a card such as this?
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You mean to go in an otherwise empty drive bay? If so, I'm kinda working on something in that vein at the moment... :D
 
glitch said:
You mean to go in an otherwise empty drive bay? If so, I'm kinda working on something in that vein at the moment... :D
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I'm headed in that general direction with my 5160. I pulled the full height 360K drive out of the center drive bay and replaced it with a black bezel TEAC 360K 5.25" half height on the bottom and a generic black bezel 720K 3.5" in a half height adapter on top. Well, it's really a 1.44M but if I don't tell the controller maybe it won't notice. ;-) A little black electrical tape over the diskette density hole works wonders. Then in the right bay where the full height 20M IBM Japan MFM drive used to be I'm going to put two more 5.25" -> 3.5" adapters with IDE to CF card units for the C and D "drives". I figure it will be handy to swap out a CF card to change OS or data and for easily removable backup media.

Something like this:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Startech-3-...181996?hash=item463c68582c:g:WecAAOSwxj5XQBoG

Be advised that the eject buttons on these have received some bad press for being easy to break.
 
DDS said:
Be advised that the eject buttons on these have received some bad press for being easy to break.
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I can confirm that the super cheap versions of these types of devices do break easily. I prefer the kind with no eject button, or one from a reputable industrial supplier for that reason.
 
The CF card has a big weakness--that's the connector. I've messed up more than one socket by pushing in a CF card with too much force when it wasn't quite in straight. Maybe we can do a version that uses SD card or USB flash. Heaven knows, they're fast enough now for vintage computer work.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Maybe we can do a version that uses SD card or USB flash. Heaven knows, they're fast enough now for vintage computer work.
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I don't know about USB -> IDE bridges (at least, not the kind that go the way *we* need :) ) but SD -> IDE bridges do exist. I know I've seen them with the SD slot accessible through a PCI/ISA slot cover, but I don't know that I've seen them in 3.5" form factor.
 
Just thinking aloud--CF cards, I think, are sunsetting, as are PATA devices in general. Interfacing to an SD card using SPI is very simple. That Orange Pi PC that I'm using has a 16GB Micro SD Class 10 card in it and it's nearly as fast as a SATA hard disk. The biggest problem that I see with Micro SD is losing the blasted tiny things.
 
That and SMD soldering -- seems a lot of hobbyists are allergic to it. I suppose leaving footprints for e.g. an Adafruit breakout board, or just providing boards with the SMD part(s) soldered down would be OK.
 
"That and SMD soldering -- seems a lot of hobbyists are allergic to it."

Unsteady hands and dimming eyesight? Nah, that couldn't be it!
 
DDS said:
Unsteady hands and dimming eyesight? Nah, that couldn't be it!
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Even younger hobbyists seem reluctant to try it out! The larger pitch stuff requires no special equipment, I started doing SOIC PICs with a 15 Watt Rat Shack pencil iron and whatever sorta-small solder they had on the shelf, on home etched boards. With a proper solder masked board, assuming you're not using paste+stencil, it's easy to just drag solder it with a squirt of liquid flux and clean up with solder wick.

But, regardless of the reason for not wanting to do it, SMD seems to be out for most hobbyist kits. I'm set up to do small runs of SMD boards here, I'm sure I could expand enough to handle hobby level order quantities. I figure assembled (or "already contains the SMD bits" assembled) will be the way any SMD projects go for hobbyist stuff.
 
Assembled one of my kits last weekend. After a little configuration so the address didn't conflict with the NIC the interface is working fine!

IMG_20160701_073109.jpg


IMG_20160705_182931.jpg


With a ST-157a I'm getting quite respectable speeds... 588k/s and 30ms seek times!

Compaq-SI.GIF


-J
 
My eyesight's as dim and my hands unsteadied by age as much as anyone's on this thread and I still managed to put together Jame's XTCF-V2 without incident (100% SMT). You just have to be careful.
 
glitch said:
it's easy to just drag solder it with a squirt of liquid flux and clean up with solder wick.
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I doubted this method until Jim Brain demonstrated it to me in person recently. I'm still a ways away from trying it, but it did indeed work and didn't seem that bad. I thought the desoldering braid would remove all of the solder, but it only removed the solder from the top of the connections; the solder underneath remained.
 
Yup, works a treat--it's particularly interesting in that you don't use a fine tip on the iron--a nice fat chisel tip works extremely well.

I do check my work with an inspection microscope after I'm done, just to be sure.
 
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