• Updated 2023-07-12: Hello, Guest! Welcome back, and be sure to check out this follow-up post about our outage a week or so ago.

TashTalk: Single-Chip LocalTalk Interface

Scott Squires

Well-known member
99% likelihood that the drive heads are stuck to a rubber bumper. That old rubber turns into a gooey sticky melty mess as it tries to return to its original state. You may have encountered rubber feet in a similar state.
 

aperezbios

Well-known member
My SE I have reassembled (it was apart for a RAM upgrade); and gets thru to a flashing question mark disk icon. There is activity on the hard drive LED, so either something went bad on the drive (corrupted boot blocks, or System Folder damage?), the drive hardware is toast, or the SE's SCSI port is bad. My guess is that there's a bad sector in a critical spot on the drive - it's an original Apple 20MB SCSI drive, so it's not surprising that it could have issues after all these years. If I can't recover the machine with my FloppyEMU, then I'll have to order a SCSI2SD - something I've been meaning to do anyway; I just haven't actually done so.
Send me a PM with an address, and I'll send you a SCSI2SD V5 at-cost.
 

bdurbrow

Well-known member
Yup. I'm afraid this HD20 is now wall art. Going to need to use either a SCSI2SD or BlueScsi.

I've tried turning on LocalTalk with the 6.0.8 boot floppy image that's on the FloppyEMU's SD card; but it doesn't seem to be generating anything on the printer port. As there's nothing in the Chooser (no CDEVs) on that image; I suspect that I'm going to have to do a full install of the system onto a SCSI2SD or BlueScsi in order to get traffic.
 

tashtari

PIC Whisperer
Hmmm. What about switching the floppy emu into HD20 emulation mode and having it boot a hard disk image with a fully stocked 6.0.8 install? I seem to remember that the floppy emu's SD card full of stuff came with such an image, though I don't remember if it had a better-stocked Chooser, so you might have to prepare a disk image using minivmac or so. I have such an image at the ready if you need it, though uploading it to the forum might be frowned upon.

In any case, if you ever feel like getting on the 68kmla IRC channel at some point, I'd be happy to work with you live, and I'm sure others would too.
 

bdurbrow

Well-known member
HD20 mode, for whatever reason, was hanging. I suspect it was trying to access the non-functional SCSI hard disk and waiting forever for a response that isn't coming. My next step is to remove that hard drive from the SE and see if matters improve.
 

bdurbrow

Well-known member
And we have a lift-off! At, uh, three minutes past the hour...

😉


Screen Shot 2022-01-05 at 2.03.22 PM.jpg

Now that I'm getting traffic flowing, I'm confidant with soldering together all the other boards.

Soon, I'll be contacting everybody who expressed an interest in one via PM to arrange for header selection, PayPal, and shipping.
 

bdurbrow

Well-known member
Six units are assembled; I hope to have the rest done tomorrow...

Also - I made a logo... it's a little simplistic, but it matches the aesthetic of the era...

TashTalk Hat Logo.png
 

bdurbrow

Well-known member
I ran into a soldering issue on a couple of boards... that means that counting one for micheledipaola, the entire batch is now spoken for.

All the boards have been assembled; but they haven't yet been cleaned of flux residue or tested. It's possible that a board might fail testing and require a bodge wire, but I'm hopeful that won't be the case. If so, I'll include some more boards & parts on my next order with JLC/DIgikey/Mouser et all, and send out a non-bodged board to any unlucky recipients of the ones that failed testing.
 
Last edited:

bdurbrow

Well-known member
Hmm... looks like the minimum size box that the international post will accept is larger than the boxes I have on hand... and the local office supply stores are all showing either excessively oversize boxes, or (ironically) mail order only. So, off to Amazon I go to get a bigger outer box so the postal sorting machines are happy.

As soon as that gets here, I can weigh the entire package and get shipping quotes for everybody.

IMG_0894.JPG

And yes, the eagle-eyed among you may notice that two of those still need female headers attached (aperezbios had asked for unsoldered headers, which accounts for the other two).
 

bdurbrow

Well-known member
All boards that have headers pre-soldered have passed testing OK - no bodge wires required. Obviously, I haven't been able to test aperezbios's two, because the headers are, well, unsoldered. ;)

For the international orders, I'm going to try to go thru Tindie, as they are a recognized marketplace for tax and customs purposes (brexit has made this... complicated).
 
Top