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Farallon ETHERMAC LC NSC w/NuBus drivers in the SE/30 PDS?

Good news: over half of the wires are stripped and ready to go

Better news: made a boo-boo above, forgot the passthru angle is already set correctly

GREAT NEWS: the prototyping card slot's "PCI Connector" has enough clearance from the inner surface of the bucket to slip poster board between the two with skootch room to spare!

 
I don't know if this helps in the tiniest bit... but I have a 3D printer (a very good one) and some basic (very basic) CAD abilities. If you need anything prototyped and mailed your way, please let me know. Chomping at the bit to help, somehow!

 
Thanks for the interest and especially for your offer. Can't think of anything to print for this project, but I'll take a rain check for another one some day! :grin:

 
View attachment Duplex-4-04.PDF

View attachment SLDR-WRAP-4-04.PDF

edit: if I weren't a firm believer in gremlins, this would take the cake! None of the PDFs I slapped together tonight will print. Even simplified and single fonted = "Not enough memory"

Yet this more complex PDF I uploaded eleven days ago prints just fine:

View attachment 26960

They should print tomorrow at work if I'm lucky. Sometimes it's just time to fall back and punt. :lol:

 
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Step one didn't really matter much if it wasn't gonna fit. :lol: I've got two full days of downsizing to get it done so I'll then have Tuesday off for wire wrapping. One last error checking session and less than half of the wires to strip. The wrap/debugging maps now register correctly and I'll  rubber the final versions to the perf board. Gettin' there, Stuff IRL gets in the way, relaxing in the AI zone helps with the mental health issues. Anxiety over the process and whether it work or not is a no-no.

 
Don't worry guys, I'm super anxious as well but I am sure we will get there.  Sounds like we will have to wait until Tuesday :cool:

 
D15-D11 wrapped - #2 booboo found in the map.

To just get started already, I went ahead and cemented Rev.7 of the wrap map to the perf board. Decided documenting the booboos on the wrap side as I went would be easy enough. I'll cement a change order list to the left of the LC Slot and a final, corrected map over the error ridden map on the connector side at some point. What a PITA to do checking and wrapping at once, but errors are easily fixed with the unwrap tool on the other end of the wrap tool. Not as easy as moving wires around on a breadboard, but far more compact, much better connection integrity and structurally robust. I need to be able to send this assembly off to a NIC wizard if I get the connections debugged and still can't get it online. I'll be happy if the SE/30 will boot with this monstrosity in place. I'll be ecstatic if the Declaration ROM on the NIC shows up in the NuBus/PDS report of TattleTech.

Before storing away tools I already had strewn about the place, I fabricated the clear plexi cover plate armor for the rat's nest of wires/chassis to hold the three cards together in handling. NIC and RA adapter are bolted up to it, ready to rock. I'd said I'd celebrate tomorrow if I finished enough downsizing by tonight with a wire wrap party, but that probably won't happen. So I'm rewarding myself with a bit of wrapping as a carrot when the timer goes off and I can stop beating myself up with the stick for a bit. Just spent way too much time getting everything squared away from the plexi fab and getting the hardware together, but I'm in a good place all in all.

That said: if someone could please proof/error check this version of the wrap mappings it would be a huge help. It's not as up to date as Rev.7, but it's the printout I'm using for markup as I wrap.

View attachment 26863

Change Order:

LC B11 Maps to IIsi C19 - DATA24 was mapped to B19 GROUND on the IIsi

LC C14 Maps to IIsi B23 - DATA14 was mapped to B23 the same pin as DATA13

 
Nope, not at all. It's an early version that should be easier to debug as the columns aren't flip flopped to match pins of the connector orientations of the board in the Rev.7 wrap map. It's a massive PITA to work from it, but the visual gymnastics of doing so seem to be helping me to find the real booboos as I make translation process booboos in the wrap.

A bunch more wrapped and I'm up to six booboos identified. I even made a booboo while highlighting one of the booboos on the card's map already! ::)

P1010039.JPG

Orange data bus complete, just six more connections to wrap and the yellow address bus will be complete. At that point it's down to the last (first) eight rows of control, IRQ and clock lines to go. But my mid-stacation wire wrap party is over and I'm back to downsizing so it's all going back into the project tray on the shelf. Maybe I can pick at it now and then, but even when I'm done with wrapping I have to flip it over and buzz every single line for proper connection, shorts power/ground disasters in the making and what not. ETA undetermined, the only thing I'd said was that I hoped to start a wrap party today in the start of the process sense. No ETA on a wrap party in the sense of a an entertainment production end celebration.

I'm very shot on hacking stuff here in the virtual world ATM and demands IRL are piling up, but we'll get there! :blink:

 
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I'm keen to start messing with this idea, but I have a bunch of SE's, and no SE/30. On top of that, the SE seems like a good place to start as they seem to be more common than the SE/30. In other words, blowing up an SE would be less heartbreaking than an SE/30. Is there a card out there I should try to find that I'd have better luck trying on an SE?

 
No, but designing an SE<->LC PDS conversion PCB would be much more economical than this SE/30 connector strapped proposition. SE and LC share the 96-pin "NuBus" connector form factor which is less than 10cm long an fits on inexpensive two sided PCBs, so that's the way I'd give that a try.

- 8MHz SE clock might be problematic in terms of timings for Ethernet from an unmodified LC NIC? Dunno.

- LC PDS is 68020 bus, so it should be 68000 bus PDS compatible,IIRC? Dunno maybe at least done a bit more so than the LC 020/LCIII 030 to full blown SE/30 bus 030 PDS? Again, dunno.

Back to my fascination with color coded wiring. The Worm Ourbouros patterns are necessitated by orientatingf the two cards so they install as compactly as possible on the conversion board. That I find the color-coded patterns aesthetically pleasing is a side benefit. Can't wait to see the two blue contro line whorls emerge with red, green, purple and black highlights intertwined. [:)]

Looks like loopy breadboard wires because I've kept "trace length" to approximately equal the longest connection necessary, which of course would be the address jumper block detour. ::)

 
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Looks AMAZING!  Don't worry guys, if this works out well, I don't mind funding the SE version of the adapter.  It should be slightly cheaper anyway.  I'm really hoping this project can work, it would really be amazing for everyone to have Ethernet cards that aren't $150+

 
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