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Super Cheap PDP-11 Bootstrap Loader

L

Lou - N2MIY

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Folks in the US,

RadioShack appears to be dumping the Parallax Propeller QuickStart boards for $7.49 ! Being a ham radio enthusiast, I am super cheap, and this deal triggered my attention upon crossing my cheapness threshold. I was thinking about building a small box to blast various pdp-11 bootstraps out a serial port, emulating ODT or console emulator (from an M9312) keystrokes to load an address, deposit the bootstrap, and then start. This cheap board and a MAX232 does the entire job.

Of course this little board could do a lot more. I suggest you go clean out your local RadioShack's supply.

Lou
 
Done this before with a PC and TeraTerm replaying text files of ODT commands to load mini test programs. Kind of slow, but works, and it a lot faster than typing by hand.

However, I would lose the propeller (unless you really want a propeller) and go with Arduino boards instead. Search Amazon for 'arduino nano' and you can find DIP-40 footprint size modules with a 328P device for $5 or so. Just needs an external RS232 driver chip/board to get RS232 levels.

Don
 
Lou - N2MIY said:
Folks in the US,

RadioShack appears to be dumping the Parallax Propeller QuickStart boards for $7.49 ! Being a ham radio enthusiast, I am super cheap, and this deal triggered my attention upon crossing my cheapness threshold. I was thinking about building a small box to blast various pdp-11 bootstraps out a serial port, emulating ODT or console emulator (from an M9312) keystrokes to load an address, deposit the bootstrap, and then start. This cheap board and a MAX232 does the entire job.

Of course this little board could do a lot more. I suggest you go clean out your local RadioShack's supply.

Lou
Click to expand...

Great idea, and a very good price. Have relieved local 'Shack of their excess inventory.
 
The 'propeller' cpu architecture is unique and interesting, being mult-core, multi-cpu. The development environment is not C, it is something called SPIN, which looks something like an object-oriented pascal derivative. --- as pointed out, this is now WRONG. There is a development environment for Propeller that is based on C programming: http://learn.parallax.com/propellerc so that at least is no longer an issue.

Having used both Propeller boards (in the form of the Briel Computers PocketTerm board) and multiple Arduino boards (which basically program in C) I vastly prefer the Arduino. The Propeller is suitable for a class of applications that can make use of multiple tightly coupled CPUs, but not much else.

For this particular usage, I would expect that most users would find that Arduino is much preferable to Propeller.

Don
 
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You can program the propeller in C these days. Two good compilers, one is gcc. Those little QuickStart boards are great. If I could get them at $15 I would buy a bunch.. when that's said, a guy from RS said that you should bring the board to the counter and have them look up the price because the shelf price may not be up to date.
And finally, the old RS price was over $40. Parallax sell them for around $33 I think.
 
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