Well pretty soon I should be able to hold one of these in my hand (only one hand required), assuming everything checks out on my final inspection. The Beta Testers haven't reported any issues for a long time now, so I'm feeling pretty confident that this will work out of the box on the first try.

Manufacturing of a few sample boards will be done by JLCPCB, leaving it up to me to stuff them with parts and solder it up. Got my fingers crossed on it passing all the tests.

What's changed from the previous V1.1 prototype?

• Audio Video jack changed from DIN-5 to DIN-8 in order to provide some additional pins for stereo audio applications utilizing the 3 pin header next to it. Nice thing is that a standard Atari DIN-5 cord will still work (great idea by tf_hh of AtariAge).
• The P-Channel MOSFET (Q3) has been changed from a TO-220 device over to an SMD part placed on the board bottom. This kills two birds with one stone, giving us a readily available replacement for an obsolete part, and also gets rid of a device that formally stood quite high on the top side of the board. This device serves as the DC power switch via a custom TK-II and PS/2 keyboard.
  
• Added CSYNC buffering to alleviate a GTIA failure problem.
• Changed to larger all SOIC SMD components for an easier hand soldering possibility.
• Broke out a couple of connections that would open the door to adding a Cart Port in a future add-on board.

Enter - FujiNet

AtariAge Mr Robot's FujiNet add-on board is getting ever closer to a final version and looking real sweet.

I have one of the bare boards to assemble, and am looking forward to seeing it in action once I do.

Pretty soon I'll have to put on my thinking cap, view some of the FujiNet tutorial videos, and see if I can get up to speed on this new wonder of the 8-bit world. It's gonna be so cool to fetch stuff from the Internet wirelessly - who would have thought this even possible back in the day.

That's all for this post - stay tuned for more to come.

- Michael

I decided to add a blog to my site, since creating topics in forums tends to get pretty disrupted due to other people's posts. While this is an integral feature of a forum, and useful for getting people to participate in the discussion, it doesn't always work well for documenting the progress on a new widget. Hence the reason I have established my own blog.

Hopefully this new endeavor will prove useful, and provide some very good information on some of the strange and wonderful gadgets I'll be coming up with.

Let the fun begin!

Michael St. Pierre