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Forthcoming XT-IDE Board - Cast Your Vote

Forthcoming XT-IDE Board - Cast Your Vote

  • As original XT-IDE, with a 40-pin header only

    Votes: 4 10.5%

  • With a 44-pin header and board space to mount a 2.5" IDE HDD (i.e. a hard-card)

    Votes: 7 18.4%

  • With an optional Compact Flash socket (as master or slave) and a 40-pin header

    Votes: 26 68.4%

  • With a Compact Flash socket only

    Votes: 1 2.6%
  • Total voters
    38
  • Poll closed .
If you want to be future proof you are going about this all the wrong way. Anything obsolete now will be harder to find later on anyway. While I have stacks of working and tested IDE (laptop and desktop) and SCSI drives from 80MB and up I figure most others don't and eventually I will run out or the ones I have will die.

What we realy need is a device that mimicks a HD but in reality is just an ethernet device that connects to any server which runs a special bit of code that creates a virtual HD file for the system we want to use. This would also make it very easy to swap hds for different tasks as needed and also make backup very simple (using the server machine). Most people have ethernet in the house (maybe even have an option for wireless) and hubs/switches and cables are pretty much free for anything pre GB ethernet. None of these old rigs needs over 1MB/sec transfers anyway (ISA bus is the limiting factor) so even 10mb is fine.

Another option would be to just have a commodity RAM based system with a rechargable battery for storage (should last a while) or just connect it to a USB keyring to transfer the HD image over if the battery is dead.

USB and ethernet will be around much longer then the different flash interfaces and ancient IDE/SCSI drives.
 
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Unknown_K said:
USB and ethernet will be around much longer then the different flash interfaces and ancient IDE/SCSI drives.
Click to expand...

As long as USB is around, there will be USB flash/pen drives. Right now, I think that the critical mass has been reached that will keep it going for a long time.

On the other hand, I think that CF cards may well go the way of SmartMedia.
 
For myself, I prefer the CF route to the others because its simply a lot less work to implement in hardware. There is no need to transform Ethernet/USB/SD to IDE, the CF card supports IDE. Also, if you are going to implement a CF slot on the card, have it poke out the back of the machine so you don't have to open the cover.
 
I've had sketchy luck finding CF cards that will work with legacy IDE controllers though. In my experience only 1 out of 3 will and those that will are the oldest in the lot. I may be in the minority though.
 
eeguru said:
I've had sketchy luck finding CF cards that will work with legacy IDE controllers though. In my experience only 1 out of 3 will and those that will are the oldest in the lot. I may be in the minority though.
Click to expand...

You're not. I got a bunch of 4GB 120x and 300x CF cards. None would be seen by my XTIDE card. I've had my best luck with old CF cards and Microdrives.

SD/SDHC isn't difficult at all if you do the interface with a microcontroller that has SPI capabilities. I think that at least one of the CPLD vendors has a reference design that translates the 4-wire SD interface to an 8-bit parallel interface.
 
Hello,
If I may, some basic "Newbie" questions on the XT-IDE board:

1. How large of Gigabyte HDD capacity can the card handle?
2. Does the card automatically find the correct Heads, Cylinders, Sectors, LBA etc?
3. Can you manually input drive Parameters or Type#?

Thanks
 
Thanks everyone for the great feedback on the board.

In v1 my goal was a test board the developers here could use to prototype a design before committing it to a 5volt, 7400 discrete logic, all through-hole PCB design. No waiting for PCBs and soldering parts to test the design. I'm open to any ideas and would love to work with you guys.

The PCBs are only available for free. I'll send anyone an updated v1b board when they arrive. The gerbers are also available, you can get 10 PCBs from a place like Seeed Studio for around $50 shipped total. I have no plans to sell PCBs, kits, or assembled hardware. I was inspired to make this version after spending days pouring over the original XTIDE design. In a few days I learned so much about PCs and buses (and CPLDs), and it all carried over to my work in other projects.

v2 is just the CPLD and EEPROM (as described here). It is basically every ISA, IDE, and EEPROM pin connected to a CPLD. It should give ultimate flexibility to prototype about any sort of hardware. I didn't do this in v1 because honestly I wasn't very good with CPLDs. I didn't know if the logic would all fit, so I stuck with a smaller piece.

Ian included Chuck's address lines changes in his board version. However if anything needed to be changed again, exacto and iron time.
Click to expand...

I did the bog-standard XTIDE layout. As I understand it, the chuckmod was done entirely in the CPLD by pietja. The EEPROM address lines were not reversed (?) but that didn't seem to be a problem (not entirely sure of why off the top of my head). You can follow pietja's tests here:
http://dangerousprototypes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=2657&start=30#p25990
There are regular and chuck-mod logic bitstreams too, verified by another user:
http://dangerousprototypes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=2657&start=75#p26937

SD/SDHC or a USB flash drive host is an interesting idea. I've looked at it in the past, and also the parallel->serial needed to store the EEPROM in cheap flashrom instead. A FPGA is my personal preference for doing that. I don't know of any (Xilinx) FPGAs with 5volt tolerant pins, so that leads to level translation circuits bigger than the EEPROM. Using a processor could work, but the timing issues would make it a labor of love I don't have the skills for.

About CF card compatibility - Pietja tested 2 CF cards with the DP v1a hardware and both worked, but none worked with the chuckmod in place. Maybe there is also a CF running at 3.3/5volt issue, technically it supports both though.
http://dangerousprototypes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=2657&start=30#p26109
 
Optional Compact Flash Socket, while I still have my two vintage 8088 boxes - I'm looking to get away from mechanical hard disks in them as I can...as mechanical hard disks in compatable data speeds/capacities are becoming more scarce and I'm going to run out of spares someday.

However, the ability to mount a hard disk inside the chassis would be rather useful, especially when it comes to installing hte XT-IDE board into an older system in a more seamless and stealth fashion, plus to get around power supply and space limitations inside a system like an original Tandy 1000 or a Compaq Portable (and not have to sacrifice a floppy drive to do it).
 
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All the CF cards I've tried worked OK with the mod in the CPLD code (and BIOS of course). Although I did have problems with one card until I changed it's supply voltage to 3.3v. I'm looking in to what exactly is going on.
 
Correct, the spec allows for either. The card I had problems with is actually labelled 3.3/5V, but was behaving later on. There was a suggestion that the circuitry used to provide 5V compatibility may put the HI state voltage right on the edge of what is being provided by 3.3V CPLD, hence the issue. But anyway, no problems at all so far with them at 3.3V. I'm yet to scope the bus to have a look at the signal quality though.
 
Anyone know more about how I can get more involved with the XT-IDE discussions? Both hardware for Mk.II going forward and xtuniversalbios on Google code (I can't figure out how to join the project!) I'm about to order Rev.P2 of the JR-IDE board and P1 of my own CPLD ISA board towards the end of this week. The last thing I want is to fork efforts, but I've been working mostly in isolation because I don't know who is involved in the other projects (aside from those that regularly communicate here). I would like to make sure I'm working towards common goals where they overlap and at least trying to keep things as integrated as much as possible (SW & HW). I'm on the N8VEM mailing list and registered at DP forums. So I suppose that's a start.

Where has hargle been? (this month at least)
 
I'm here, watching this thread with great interest.
rev2 of the XTIDE is in a holding pattern. Real life has bumped a lot of my time away from debugging the prototype cards that I have right now, and honestly, my interest in debugging this thing is waning. Perhaps as winter comes in, my interest will come back online.

Our rev2 card is extremely complicated, a bit of a PITA to build up, and expensive. (each prototype was around $70 fully populated).
I like where this card is headed, and if this were to become a replacement for rev2, I am perfectly happy with that.
 
Agree. It appears to me that XT-IDE V2 is overcome by events with the appearance of the CPLD version. Two different versions of the board doing similar things differently and splitting up the community means neither will have enough to be economically viable.

Like Hargle, real life has been very demanding recently and I have little time available to work on homebrew projects. This is just a hobby for me and fairly low on the priorities list. There is no point in wasting time duplicating others efforts.

My recommendation is to retire the XT-IDE V1 and V2 board projects and move on. Thanks!

Andrew Lynch
 
Andrew and Hargle... if that's how things go, then it's been a fun ride for the XT-IDE. Thanks again for all of your work on it! Me and my 4 board are quite happy with the results :)

I've also been following these threads with interest.. just wish that I had the design know-how and time in general to help out more. That JrIDE does look quite nice! As does the CPLD version of the XT-IDE. I'm up in the air on whether I need either of them, but they're nice projects regardless.
 
I thought the V2 was getting to be a little too involved for what it was.

Do people want a "build it yourself" board or a "built by someone else" board? If the answer is "build it myself", then the V1 XTIDE (with perhaps a couple of very small changes) is still the best bet.

If nobody cares for the DIY experience, I think its a shame, but it answers the question for this and other future projects.
 
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