Month: July 2017

I’m going to be taking a break for a week and not doing much with the business, definitely not shipping anything and probably not much development except maybe for finishing the KIM Clone revisions.

Last day to order to get shipment: Friday evening, July 28th.  I’ll ship on Saturday morning.  No more shipments until August 7th.

KIM Clone update: I’m hitting too many problems to do much more debugging, so now I’m finishing the board layout and will order a few of the new boards to continue testing with.  I’m still not 100% sure about a few things but it’s getting really difficult to debug with all the work-arounds on the rev 1 boards.

 

Bit by bit I’m slowly getting it tested and debugged.  There were a few problems with pins crossed but maost of those cuts/jumpers were made and it’s definitely running the KIM monitor program from the USB terminal interface, so it’s a functioning system.  Today I need to create a new EEPROM that puts the KIM monitor back in low memory where it belongs, then put my extended monitor in high EEPROM to get some much needed tools (memory tester) working.

There are still more problems to fix and one of my “improvements” turned out to be a bad idea so that has to be reworked.  All-in-all, the first spin of the board is working about as well as I had hoped.  I’m also going to switch to larger buttons for the keypad.

There is no estimate on availability yet.  It will definitely turn into a product but I’m really working hard to make sure it’s as close to perfect as possible, and that’s taking time.

 

I’ll try not to do several posts in one day but figured this was worth a mention.  I have the KIM monitor running on the serial port, but with some changes to be in upper EEPROM and other minor mods.  As testing continues, more errors are becoming apparent and I’ve done a number of cuts/jumpers to solve issues.  It’s been a long day of testing and debugging so I will probably just take a break for the evening and get back to it tomorrow.

It looks like a new spin of boards will be ordered early next week with fixes to all the problems found so far.  I will continue doing more debugging in the next few days, but it’s time for a clean board.  So far, this is coming up a lot faster than I had planned.