My hardware project :: GCart 2011

[TLovskog]

Sorry for the late reply.

Apart from the obvious FoTA possibilities (Firmware update over The Air) the idea is to be able to use the http protocol in the kernel I/O subsystem. So you can ...

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LOAD "http://www.mydomain.com/VIC20/pacman.bin",8,1

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LOAD "ftp://www.mydomain.com/VIC20/pacman.bin",8,1

or

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OPEN1,4,1,"172.16.1.36":PRINT#1 "Printing to Network printer"

or

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OPEN1,4,1,"mail.myserver.se:25":PRINT #1 "EHLO mother.myserver.se":PRINT #1 "MAIL FROM: thomas@mother.myserver.se" ...

[beamrider]

That looks great

Have you also thought about also being able to bypass the kernel and load data blocks directly into the cart RAM - which I presume would be much faster?

Any ideas when you will have evaluation boards ready?

[Mike]

Have you also thought about also being able to bypass the kernel and load data blocks directly into the cart RAM - which I presume would be much faster?

That was one of the main promises brought forward already in the first two pages of this thread. Either mapping in blocks into expansion RAM directly from a file (which doesn't work for the internal RAM, however) or doing CPU emulated DMA from a file on SD card with transfer rates in excess of 100 KB/s. Even if the latter file access wouldn't be as fast as banked RAM, it would still surpass *all* *other* means of file transfer methods by a factor of ten!

Any ideas when you will have evaluation boards ready?

Sorry to say that, but I think those boards could have been done long ago already.

[TLovskog]

Hi,

Unfortunately this takes ridiculously long time. Mostly actually because I keep changing my mind and get more "kicks" from doing the layouts and doing stuff as low cost/feature as possible.

But we are slowly getting there. As a coincidence the latest board is going to manufacturing this weekend.

[Mike]

@Thomas: PM sent

[Kakemoms]

If you have a board to spare, I would like one.

I can do the soldering myself if you don't want to.

[TLovskog]

Well finally a new version of the board is on it's way to the factory.

As soon as I have something that actually somewhat boots and works I will gladly make them available. I am aiming for sub 50 USD with professionally moulded plastics and frontpanel foil ... if I can get 200 units. It is all about the amortisation of the mould tool and PCB.

I have 2 variants of this. GCart and GCart Jr. They are pretty similar, but Jr was supposed to be extremely cheap. However, I have managed to push both BoMs quite low, so maybe it makes no sense to have both.

GCart has 16G of DDR memory, Jr has only 1M SRAM.
GCart has a 3800 LUT FPGA and a MCU, where Jr has a simpler MCU with a smaller FPGA fabric. Much more like CPLD as XC9500.
Both have LEDs, Buttons, µSD and WiFi.

[Kakemoms]

Well finally a new version of the board is on it's way to the factory.

As soon as I have something that actually somewhat boots and works I will gladly make them available. I am aiming for sub 50 USD with professionally moulded plastics and frontpanel foil ... if I can get 200 units. It is all about the amortisation of the mould tool and PCB.

I have 2 variants of this. GCart and GCart Jr. They are pretty similar, but Jr was supposed to be extremely cheap. However, I have managed to push both BoMs quite low, so maybe it makes no sense to have both.

GCart has 16G of DDR memory, Jr has only 1M SRAM.
GCart has a 3800 LUT FPGA and a MCU, where Jr has a simpler MCU with a smaller FPGA fabric. Much more like CPLD as XC9500.
Both have LEDs, Buttons, µSD and WiFi.

Looks really nice! Amazing you were able to keep the BOM so low. Is the TCP/IP stack handled by the WiFi chip or the FPGA?

[Topiux]

Hey Tom,

With the nearing of the year's end I'd like to ask if we're going to have GCarts in 2018, maybe Santa will bring them down to us? Ho Ho Ho

Topo

[joshuadenmark]

Hey Tom,

With the nearing of the year's end I'd like to ask if we're going to have GCarts in 2018, maybe Santa will bring them down to us? Ho Ho Ho

Topo

Perhaps GCarts 2021

[TLovskog]

If I really push the envelope on this project ... perhaps

Sorry guys, but I have so many times decided to pull the plug on this, but still ...

A New naming scheme is a must though ...

[beamrider]

Well at least you have another 10 years of new tech to consider: Better FPGAs, ESP8266/32 etc

[Mike]

If at least the proposed fast file I/O would see the light of day ...

[TLovskog]

Well at least you have another 10 years of new tech to consider: Better FPGAs, ESP8266/32 etc

That is true. Although not so much have actually happened in that respect. There are better FPGA, but I would argue that we are more interested in the lower end with packages easier to solder and 5V tolerant pins with TTL levels on output.

[TLovskog]

I have, at least, done a new testbed for my experiments. A cleaned motherboard with sockets and everything on a 6mm aluminum chassis. The 4 studs to the right will have a a power supply with a 9V inverter running from USB Type C.