[Coco] Micro SD CoCo

[Roger Taylor]

At 08:25 AM 10/21/2009, you wrote:
>Finally! I have seen the same thing for the Atari ST, Apple 2 and 
>Commodore 64 and was hoping the Coco would follow with a similar system soon.
>
>What kind of price point are you thinking of asking for this and is 
>there a semi set release date?


The release date and price for the disk/drive pak will mainly depend 
on a handful of preorders to get me started better.  That's a 
guarantee that I will have enough parts on hand to produce orders 
quicker instead of sending off for parts per order and too frequently 
which puts me in a bind.

I also whipped up a tiny adaptor board in ExpressPCB which I can 
repeat in a grid fashion on a 3.8" x 2.5" board that they make for a 
special price (3 for $51).  I need to send off for those boards and 
of course find the 90-degree male and female headers (1x5 and 1x6) to 
solder in.  That's the tiny adaptor that must go between the drive 
module and the serial pak header.  I just connects the right pins 
together and adds a few resistors to pull up the TX and RX lines to 
5v in case of float since the module has an autobaud detector (which 
is nice).  This will still take up less space than the EB301 wireless module.

Too many other details probably won't matter much at this time.  The 
pak will just WORK right out of the box.  Any support files or demos 
will actually be on the pak itself and you can get to them simply by 
typing "DIR" or "DOS" to boot into NitrOS-9.  :)  Anything else would 
be overselling the idea.  I think it speaks for itself.

I'm watching the tiny LED on the drive module right now and it looks 
like a Strobe Light as I read every sector on DRIVE 0.  The CoCo is 
at 2mhz.  Even at 1mhz, it's still way faster than a real floppy system.

When I'm done I should have it where one could plug in a wireless pak 
and a drive pak and just load up their card from their PC over the 
air, but we'll still be able to image the card on the PC (backup, 
add/remove virtual drives, etc.) regardless.

-- 
~ Roger Taylor