Yesterday I assembled, tested, and shipped out three prototype NUC-FujiNet V1.5 boards to people in the Beta Team for their review.
When it comes to hardware development I can be very tenacious at fine tuning the design, but I'm afraid my patience for running thorough tests of all the different aspects is quite a bit less then desired. In order to insure that all of the bugs got squished out of this particular design iteration, I'll bow out and let the Beta Team have at it (Stephen, Herb, and Simon).
Assuming that all goes well in this regard, then AtariAge member Mr Robot will finalize the production FujiNet design he has been diligently working on, which will also incorporate the option of a top side-loading cartridge slot, as well as all the interface changes coming out of the V1.5 prototype (e.g., full SIO isolation when powered off).
And thanks to AtariAge member mozzwald, the SD card detect switch feature of this design has also been fully realized in the latest firmware release, so that we can now do SD card hot plugging and/or card swapping without the necessity of powering down or resetting the FujiNet board to reinitialize the card. This is an uber cool feature!
Production Design
Mr Robot's production board + case design concept is rapidly advancing, as can be seen in these simulated examples he created and first posted at AtariAge. And thanks to dimensional info coming from other members in the forums, he has hopefully gotten things sized to accept any and all cartridges ever made for the Atari 8-bit, including those wider AVG and SIDE carts, and the unique XE carts with the ridge sticking out of the back side.
When it comes to hardware development I can be very tenacious at fine tuning the design, but I'm afraid my patience for running thorough tests of all the different aspects is quite a bit less then desired. In order to insure that all of the bugs got squished out of this particular design iteration, I'll bow out and let the Beta Team have at it (Stephen, Herb, and Simon).
Assuming that all goes well in this regard, then AtariAge member Mr Robot will finalize the production FujiNet design he has been diligently working on, which will also incorporate the option of a top side-loading cartridge slot, as well as all the interface changes coming out of the V1.5 prototype (e.g., full SIO isolation when powered off).
And thanks to AtariAge member mozzwald, the SD card detect switch feature of this design has also been fully realized in the latest firmware release, so that we can now do SD card hot plugging and/or card swapping without the necessity of powering down or resetting the FujiNet board to reinitialize the card. This is an uber cool feature!
Production Design
Mr Robot's production board + case design concept is rapidly advancing, as can be seen in these simulated examples he created and first posted at AtariAge. And thanks to dimensional info coming from other members in the forums, he has hopefully gotten things sized to accept any and all cartridges ever made for the Atari 8-bit, including those wider AVG and SIDE carts, and the unique XE carts with the ridge sticking out of the back side.
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Ultimately the plan is to offer it either as a stand-alone FujiNet minus the cart connector and raised case design, or as the full boat that you see here with the cartridge port inclusive. Obviously the non-cart version will be extremely compact with a minimal height requirement, thereby having a much lower profile lid for the case.
Needless to say, I think Mr Robot's design really hit it out of the park!
- Michael
- Michael
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