The clock is counting down, and in just a few hours it will be 2024 - a New Year!

So I thought before the change occurs I'd make one last blog entry, and of course it's going to be about my ongoing project the NUCplus4 daughter board for the 576NUC+.

So what's been happening?

Well I definitely lucked out with the FujiNet plug-in add on board, and it appears that it's first physical manifestation is good to go out of the box. After testing it for a couple of weeks now, it looks solid.

However on the actual daughter board there was one small correction that had to be made during testing and that has to do with the VCC for the PS/2 keyboard sub-processor (PIC12F629) which needs to go from 5V down to 3.3V. With 5V it was causing the A8Pico Cart to not be accessible via the USB connection. Drilling out the VCC pad and then running a short jumper wire will correct it on the present rev of the PCB boards I had manufactured, but in the long run the gerbers will get updated and the rev level will be incremented.

I also spent a good week working on case mods to create a new 3D printed enclosure for this new NUCplus4 version. And I gotta say it's looking pretty slick. Check out this quick video I did to  introduce it.

My 3D printer is not the best, or perhaps I just don't have it dialed in properly, but it still turned out pretty nice none the less.

This case is specific to the 576NUC+ with the plus4 daughter board and the FujiNet plug-in. As such it is 8mm taller than the standard case. Still very compact.

Currently I'm wrapping up the firmware development for all the PIC chips required to bring this system together, so that all aspects of control happen from the PS/2 keyboard. To make this a thing, it required two sub-processors, one on each board in order to recognize and respond to additional key shortcuts to control the SDrive, A8Pico Cart, and the FujiNet. The end result means you will find no physical switches on this new system - absolutely none! This aspect also played into making the case mods a bit easier to pull off.

I think I'll wrap this up for now and get ready to usher in the New Year. So my next post for the new year should hopefully be about the imminent public release of the system design, as well as a good demo video of the system in action.

Happy New Year everyone!

- Michael

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This is what the production unit looks like. Well at least the boards, I still need to rework the 3D printed case as well.

The NUCplus4-Main Board is now at version 1.5, having gone through two previous sample board runs and several on paper only design improvements. And the NUCplus4-FujiNet Plug-In Board is at version 1.4 due to several evolutionary advancements, although this is the first time its taken actual physical form.

It took me about 3 hours to build both of these, and then another few hours tweaking the firmware on the PIC chips to take it to where I wanted to go with the UI, which is entirely under PS/2 keyboard control - no push buttons, slide switches, or toggle switches.

I'm going to keep this blog post short, but I promise to reveal much more in the next one to come.

Stay tuned.

- Michael

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