[Coco] The MOOH board (MMU/SPI) for Dragon/CoCo1/2

[Gene Heskett]

On Sunday 18 March 2018 10:32:48 Tormod Volden wrote:

> On Sun, Mar 18, 2018 at 12:22 AM, Bill Pierce  wrote:
> > Tormod, what kind of price range? And are you planning boards with
> > more memory?
>
> Hi Bill,
>
> All prices are on my web site. The board itself is 60 USD. I am not
> planning any new boards, nor any modifications to the board. The MOOH
> board was a redesign of the previous Spinx-512 board taking into
> consideration all experience and feedback on that board, I don't know
> if I dare say it is perfect :) but I think it fits the bill and I feel
> I have reached my goal for the hardware. If there will be a lot of
> software development for this platform over the next years and we'll
> encounter real applications needing more memory, I would maybe look at
> it again. For example if you port MShell and Ultimuse3 to 256x192
> resolution and they remain usable and beg for more memory :) Note also
> that the SD card transfers have nearly the bandwidth of a RAM disk.
>
> Regards,
> Tormod

I've seen mention of an SPI interface, and am wondering what is the 
bandwidth achievable? I am currently running an 11" swing by 54" bed, 70 
yo Sheldon lathe talking to its interface/control card at 41 megabaud,  
and rx'ing the cards replies at 25 megabaud, using an r-pi-3b as the 
computer, with 32 bit (4 bytes) data packets. Working quite well except 
for the pi's well known penchant for throwing away both mouse and 
keyboard events from its own keyboard and mouse. That is a separate 
problem created by its i/o architecture. Once the data has made it thru 
the usb2 hub, the rest of it is flawless.  The machine control is via 
the SPI port, and doesn't have to run the usb2 gauntlet.

But there is a minimum SPI speed needed to achieve usable following 
errors. Probably faster than this board can do, but I'd be curious to 
have an apples to apples comparison.

-- 
Cheers, Gene Heskett
--
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