SCSI2SD Project - anyone interested ?

[techknight]

Especially on a 1st gen SCSI SE bus.

 

[uniserver]

so i would assume you guys just bought the pcb and populated it your selves, or did you also buy a parts kit with the pcb's?

for the guys that built it them selves what do you think your total cost was?

 

[bbraun]

To program them, you pretty much need a miniprog3, which is about $90. It's only used once in the initial programming, since mmcmaster has the software update via usb working. He's made it so any jtag or swd programming device should work, but I haven't found any software other than the Cypress stuff that knows how to program these chips, and the device support for the Cypress stuff is limited. After fighting for a while to get my jlink2 device to program these things, I decided it was much more expedient to just get the miniprog3. Especially with being the first set of devices I assembled and not sure if it's my assembly or the software that was the problem.

If you buy PCBs in quantity of 10, I think it ran about $3/board shipped.

Then the rest of the parts come to about $30-$40 depending on quantity ordered, I think. The most expensive individual part is the processor, which is about $10 or so depending on where you get it and quantity. Unfortunately, it's also the most difficult to solder correctly by hand. I've messed up one or two, which is kind of a bummer but hey, that just means I could use the practice, right?

The good news is, after assembling a couple of these, the floppyemus seemed easy!

 

[uniserver]

well if he is selling them for $45 assembled? isn't that kind of a really good deal?

 

[bbraun]

Absolutely!

 

[LCGuy]

Yep - I bought mine for that price + shipping, fully assembled. Updated the firmware and configured it on my PC, went down to Coles and grabbed a cheapie microSD card, slapped it in, installed it in the Mac SEx (my souped up SE/30 upgraded SE), formatted it, works perfectly, no complaints here

 

[uniserver]

Mac SEx

LOL, what about your suped up SE/30 makes it so sexy?

Granted in order for it to still be SEx , wouldn't it need to still to contain a 68030?

wonder what shipping to use 48033 would run?

 

[LCGuy]

It started out in life as a bog stock 800k SE, which it remained until I got my hands on it. (at which point the logic board was dead and rusted out, as was the chassis and floppy drive) So I got to work on it...new rust free SE/30 chassis, recapped SE/30 logic board, a full 128MB of RAM, NOS SuperDrive SCSI2SD with a 4GB microSD card, its a beast. All it needs now is a IIfx/IIsi ROM SIMM and an ethernet card

As for the name - I always thought it was hilarious that the SE/30 could have ended up being called that, had Apple stuck to their naming convention :lol:

 

[techknight]

Is there a different processor and toolchain we can use that doesnt use expensive programmers? or is the cypress it...

 

[dougg3]

I think there is documentation for how to bit bang program these chips available from Cypress, but I was too lazy to bother looking. I was expecting OpenOCD to be able to support it, but no such luck.

BTW, there are still problems with Apple HD SC Setup. Not a huge deal for me since Drive Setup works fine, but I've seen it fail to verify the formatting and I've also seen it succeed, but only format a card limited to 1 GB as about 19 MB. Not sure what's going on, but it could still be stuff that's stubbed out as doing nothing that confuses Apple HD SC Setup.

 

[mmcmaster]

A quick update:

Unfortunately I've had to increase the price to $75 AUD per board as it takes quite a bit of time to make each board. Still a good deal compared to buying a Miniprog3 for $90 to program your own board I have no boards currently in stock, but I have a large order of 50 PCBs that should arrive within 2 weeks.

I haven't had much time over the past 4 weeks to spend on SCSI2SD, so progress has been limited. I have a holiday from work over the Christmas period, so I expect to deliver some firmware updates (Apple HD SC fixes, and performance improvements, and a few other fixes I've already implemented) before the end of the year.

I think there is documentation for how to bit bang program these chips available from Cypress, but I was too lazy to bother looking.

There is source code available from Cypress that could be ported to an Arduino or similar for easy/cheap programming. See http://www.cypress.com/?rID=57435.

 

[techknight]

I found this:

http://dangerousprototypes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=56&t=3105

Wonder if that would work.

 

[mmcmaster]

bbraun mentioned that mmcmaster had pointed to the lack of MODE SELECT support being a potential problem, so I took a look. This patch to the code makes it work:

Thanks dougg3! I've integrated your code, and it works perfectly (albeit extremely slowly).

I've made a new firmware release incorporating this fix, and merged in few other reliability fixes. Compiled firmware is at http://www.codesrc.com/files/scsi2sd/v3.0.1/firmware/, for use with the original v3.0 bootloaderhost utility.

 

[mmcmaster]

BTW, there are still problems with Apple HD SC Setup. Not a huge deal for me since Drive Setup works fine, but I've seen it fail to verify the formatting and I've also seen it succeed, but only format a card limited to 1 GB as about 19 MB.

I'll run a 1GB format attempt overnight to see what happens. I suspect it will work properly now with the other fixes I've merged in.

 

[dougg3]

Thanks for the firmware update! Just tested again, same result. Ended up with an 18.6 MB partition after formatting with Apple HD SC Setup 7.0.1. Was set up with --blocks=2097152 to give a 1 GB maximum size...

 

[mmcmaster]

I've noticed a bug where the SCSI2SD needs to be fully reset before the scsi2sd-config --blocks parameter takes effect (ie. all power sources, including the SCSI host, disk drive power connector, and USB cable are disconnected or turned off). Is it possible that you previously set a small 20Mb size limit, and then haven't reset it since ?

 

[dougg3]

Yep, it was fully reset. Totally unplugged from everything after doing the scsi2sd-config command. I've never configured it for a size other than 8 MB, 1 GB, and unlimited anyway. I'll keep looking into what's going on with it...pretty weird! I wonder if limiting the size to 20 MB or 30 MB will result in the same problem...

 

[dougg3]

Limiting to a 30 MB drive size also causes this same problem--I end up with an 18.6 MB formatted volume.

So then I kept it at 30 MB, put the SD card into my computer, and dd'ed all zeros to the first 50 MB of the SD card just to verify it's not getting confused by pre-existing data. Apple HD SC Setup still formats it as only 18.6 MB. Weird!

 

[techknight]

does 18.6MB end in some weird logical block address that is getting confused in the firmware?

 

[mmcmaster]

I also get the 18.6Mb partition It seems HD SC Setup is using an internal database to lookup the size of the Seagate ST225N drive (20MB) and using that value instead of the drive's reported size.

I've made a new firmware release (3.1) which doubles read/write speeds to above 900kb/sec, and fixes a few minor errors.