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Apple IIe DIY Serial Card?

Yes, same one. It has the github link at the top and says "mirror of..."

By the way, for anyone else who stumbles across this thread later with my original use case (just needing a single SSC), I will say that I was able to get a working one off eBay for $50 shipped after watching the search results for a few weeks.

At this point I'm going ahead with the build project because it's a fun project and it never hurts to have an extra or two.
 
Addendum, if you put the "sold" filter on a search for these, there are even some recent ones that went for as little as $15 shipped!
 
Yeah but you have to find them as soon as they are listed. Are you insinuating it cost you more than $50.00 to build so far? How much?
 
Well, I got that $50 one in an auction! I guess that might have been lucky?

Costs so far:

Jameco Order #1: $52.68 (EEPROM x2, MAX3232 transceivers x4, IC sockets)
Jameco Order #2: $30.25 (6551 chips x3)
eBay Order #1: $14.97 (Lattice GAL22V10B x5)
eBay Order #2: $32.10 (GlitchWorks Apple II Protoboards x2)

Total: $130.00

These parts are enough to manually make 2 serial cards ($65 per card), with almost enough extra to make a third. For an additional $30 in parts I could make a third one, bringing the cost per card to about $53.

If you were going to do this at scale, you could probably bring some of these costs down hunting for bargains and buying in bulk, but I didn't do any of that.

I didn't have to buy some things like wire wrap wire, capacitors of various types, and I'm not including the cost of the programmer ($60).
 
We should probably keep in mind that there's a global chip shortage right now. These prices might very well be wildly inflated.
 
One thing I keep thinking about is.... These ESP8266 modules could be programmed to do parallel transfers rather than having to go through the 6551. Perhaps a 6522 instead. It would probably be significantly faster than serial. It would also get around the bugs in WDC's implementation of the new-production 6551s, assuming that's still a thing and they haven't fixed it.

Assuming that the firmware worked kinda-the-same as the SSC, one would think that the usual terminal software would work with such a device.
 
I don't have enough experience to immediately understand how you get to the esp8266 without going through a 6551 (as in Dan Werner's design), BUT I have been thinking you could probably shave off some of the cost and complexity of this by stopping after the 6551 (with a TTL level UART) and then having a connector either for an esp8266 module, OR one of these uart ttl to rs232 converters. $7 for 5 of them. Using these also has the advantage of saving you the cost of having to buy the actual connector...
 
The guy who created the simple clone omitted the DIP switches, so the port config won’t be a given. He said that he would upload a ROM with a set config, but I don’t see one, yet.

- Alex
 
Wouldn't that only matter in the case of trying the ADTPro bootstrap? Serious question, I don't fully understand the implications, but it sounded like it's just in a random state on boot...?
 
thenzero said:
I don't have enough experience to immediately understand how you get to the esp8266 without going through a 6551 (as in Dan Werner's design), BUT I have been thinking you could probably shave off some of the cost and complexity of this by stopping after the 6551 (with a TTL level UART) and then having a connector either for an esp8266 module, OR one of these uart ttl to rs232 converters. $7 for 5 of them. Using these also has the advantage of saving you the cost of having to buy the actual connector...
Click to expand...

You'd have to program the esp8266 firmware to read bytes off the GPIO pins and do some handshaking instead of making calls to serial.read I reckon. 6502 firmware would need entry points matching those of the SSC that hit the 6522 instead of a 6551. I haven't really sat down and thought about it deeply, nor brushed up on what is required to make a card work with PR# and IN# and such.

Think of it as talking to the esp8266 through a bidirectional parallel port instead of a serial port.
 
bladamson said:
You'd have to program the esp8266 firmware to read bytes off the GPIO pins and do some handshaking instead of making calls to serial.read I reckon. 6502 firmware would need entry points matching those of the SSC that hit the 6522 instead of a 6551. I haven't really sat down and thought about it deeply, nor brushed up on what is required to make a card work with PR# and IN# and such.

Think of it as talking to the esp8266 through a bidirectional parallel port instead of a serial port.
Click to expand...
Oh snap. That’s a great idea.
 
Life got in the way of hobby this weekend, but I did manage to solder in all the sockets and headers. Pictured with chips socketed for dramatic effect! Haha.

IMG_2965.jpg
 
I've made a commodore 64 6551/esp8266 cartridge (Swiftlink clone), and yes, you can just slave a esp8266 right to the uart. If I'm remembering right you have to set dcd always high to get the 6551 to talk. I should grab myself a apple proto board and a gal to try, I already have everything else in stock.
 
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