I’ve officially sent out an email letting all interested parties know that the kit is available again. This time, I’m going to focus on just building and testing the boards and let the installation be done by the end user or a local service center. The new style boards require more end-user work, but it’s mostly removing IC’s and installing sockets.

We’re pretty much done with software development for now; both mine and Jim’s schedules will only allow for bug fixes or minor tweaks. That may change in the future. SCSI support is pretty much gone. The new board has locations for the SCSI components but I won’t be installing them unless by special request.

Next, I have to work on a revised service manual to go with the new CPU board. The text is almost done, just need to take some pictures of the process.

Hopefully there are a few people left who haven’t lost interest and moved over to soft-synths…

It’s been almost a year since my last post. I haven’t abandoned the project, but two things have severely limited my time: 1) I’ve been working 70+ hours a week getting the new Technicolor at Paramount studios online and 2) Raising my son Ivan, now 15 months old. However I did have time to redo the main CPU board, and tomorrow I ship to the first customer.

I’m going to slowly start delivering the boards with a new pricing structure. It will be $250 for the kit, and another $50 for me to do the modification. As before, if you’re technically inclined you can probably do it yourself. The $250 does not include the SCSI option (it’s another $30), since almost nobody uses SCSI anymore.

My new company, Straylight Engineering, will host these pages until I redo the site.

http://www.straylightengineering.com

I plan on sending an official email to those of you have been waiting for me to start making the kit again. Ivan thanks you all for your patience…

It’s become somewhat of a cliche in Hollywood to ‘reboot’ a movie franchise if the current sequels aren’t doing so hot in the movie theaters. So, I’ve decided to take a page from their book…or script…whatever. I’ve decided to stop work on the new CPU board that I was developing and start fresh.

There are a few reasons for this. I was planning on using the VNC2 USB controller with the new design. However when I started testing, there were serious bugs in the firmware, which the manufacturer hasn’t addressed. There were issues with driving the sound generator board with a 3.3V CPLD device. Also Jim hasn’t really had time to debug the new floppy controller or deal with the bugs in the USB controller. In true Hollywood style, the project has been in “development hell”.

So, I’ve decided to keep things simple. The new design will be a daughterboard that plugs onto the stock DSS-1 CPU board. About 75% of the original CPU board’s functions will still be used. The new board will contain the new CPU, memory, SCSI controller, USB controller, and a couple of logic arrays to tie things together.

Why didn’t I just use this approach in the first place? One of the main goals of the original CPU board that I designed was to reduce power consumption so that the power supply would not have to be modified to handle a larger current draw. Without the original RAM, ROM, CPU, and assorted 74LS chips, I think the power requirements should be less than the original board.

Between my new job at Technicolor Sound Services, having a new house and a new baby boy, my R&D time has been pretty limited. The new design is ready to be manufactured, so unless I run into serious design flaws, I can start shipping the kit in the near future.

Not too much to report this time. Jim has two of the new boards to test. One has a VNC1 and one has a VNC2. The VNC2 has problems loading larger files; I’m hoping it’s a firmware issue. Yesterday FTDI released new firmware, so when I get a chance, I’ll upload it to one of my boards and test it.

I’ve started looking into having the boards assembled for me, but so far the cheapest I’ve found is about $30 per board. So unless I get an order for 500 kits, I’m still going to be building them myself.

Most of my time this month has been spent hanging out with my son, born on Jan 3rd. It’s really an amazing experience but it does tend to soak up any free time during the day 🙂

I did a quick layout of the buffer board and sent it off to Advanced Circuits in Colorado – they have a good ‘Bare-Bones’ service and quick delivery. I ordered the buffer chips as well. When everything arrived, I realized that one of the chips was the wrong package size (TSSOP instead of SSOP), so that delayed things as well. After getting the correct size chip, I finally built and installed the board. I was still having issues, and after disassembling and tracing the code, I had to make some changes to the design of the 8155/8255 CPLD replacement. Once I did that, it passed the WRAM test – sort of. It was still only reporting 1 WRAM page instead of 64. Better than nothing though.

Next task was getting the board to boot to the main menu. It wouldn’t get past the check for the VNC2 controller, so I had to program that as well. I purchased a FT232R USB-to-serial board off of eBay, and wired it up to the board. After three or four nights of futile attempts, I put the 232R board under the microscope and discovered that the silkscreen labels for the TXD and RXD (transmit and receive points) were backwards. After that, the VNC2 was successfully programmed and the board booted to the main screen.

At this point, everything works except for USB. The VNC2 is correctly identified but defaults to the wrong command format. I have to dig in to the source code and make some changes. The new floppy controller appears to work fine, and most importantly, the DSS-1 plays sounds. The multi-page WRAM issue turned out to be a bad cable.

And finally, it turns out the buffer board was unnecessary – I reconfigured the interface ports using a method in a Xilinx app note that Jim pointed out to me – and if the VNC2 changes work, the board will be ready. I won’t even have to do a second revision 🙂

I wasn’t really happy with the result of cleaning the PC boards that I’ve built. Using flux remover always left residue on the board, and soaking in isopropyl alcohol overnight, although better, still wasn’t perfect. I did some investigating and decided to get an ultrasonic cleaner. The model I got, a Crest 1875D has a large enough tray that I can put a whole KLM-782 board in it. My friend Evan recommended Alconox products to clean the board, so I got some Detergent-8, and the combination of the two has been the bomb.

I also got a relatively inexpensive stereo microscope off of eBay, which has been a Godsend for soldering the fine pitch components especially on the memory board. Soldering with a loupe stuck in my eye wasn’t very good for my vision!

Four orders last week, a complete DSS-1, a board set, and two kits to ship out. This week, another complete DSS-1 (possibly two), and there are many others that are interested. I think I’m going to have to pull some boards from my already modified DSS-1’s….

I should start work on the new CPU board soon. I’m at the point where I’m just finessing the final design. I just found out that the Vinculum II is coming out, and am wondering if I should wait for that. The new board should run the existing code aside from the new floppy controller. For some reason they moved the control registers around in the memory map, but all that needs to change is the register definitions. Unfortunately this means maintaining two separate builds of code. The new board will also have a larger SRAM chip for future expansion.

The new ASR-10 SP3 board is completed as well. It’s all working without incident, apart from the 2N3904 transistors I had ALL being out of spec and not working right!! I’m sending one to Garth Hjelte at Rubber Chicken Software to do some beta testing.