{"id":1167,"date":"2017-01-28T18:44:16","date_gmt":"2017-01-28T18:44:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.randomorbit.co.uk\/?p=1167"},"modified":"2017-01-29T15:33:08","modified_gmt":"2017-01-29T15:33:08","slug":"interak-compact-flash-adapter-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.randomorbit.co.uk\/?p=1167","title":{"rendered":"Interak Compact Flash adapter – Part 1."},"content":{"rendered":"

I have been making good progress with the Interak-1<\/a> and having a lot of fun on the way. I have made an adapter<\/a> so that I can use a modern USB keyboard. I completed the VDU2K<\/a> video board that was given to me with the machine so now I want to improve its storage.<\/p>\n

My machine came with a twin port cassette card and a floppy disk controller.<\/p>\n

I don’t think cassette is a goer these days. It was OK back in the day for home use but this machine deserves better. The floppy disk controller will be useful but I’m rather taken by Scott Baker<\/a>‘s Compact Flash adapter<\/a> for Spencer Owen’s RC2014<\/a> Z80 retro machine.<\/p>\n

Spencer is an old friend of mine and his RC2014 has become very popular, with many kits being sold through his Tindie<\/a> store. As with other good ideas, RC2014 has been a focal point for other people’s efforts and Scott Baker has contributed some great projects that build on the RC2014 is very cool ways. The Compact Flash adapter is one such project.<\/p>\n

Scott has generously put his designs out there and made his PCB designs<\/a> available through OSHpark<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The bits on the bus (go up and down)<\/h2>\n

Both the Interak-1 and the RC2014 are Z80, slot based machines with easy access to the bus. The first thing to sort out is to get the buses to match.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I was given two blank prototype cards with the Interak and so one of those will do fine.<\/p>\n

There is a possibility that I will want to add more than one RC2014 board to my machine and so I didn’t want to just solder one of Scott’s PCBs to the proto card. At this point I bought an RC2014 5-slot backplane<\/a> and planned to fit that to the proto board and link between the to buses.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>In this photo you can see that I have soldered a pack of short links from the Interak bus connector. These will go on to have their loose ends swapped about and fitted into the RC2014 bus.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Here you see that I have pushed the flying leads into one of the backplane’s slots. At this point I was just setting things up and testing the connections.<\/p>\n

OK in principle but I need A bit of Vero<\/h2>\n

\"\"<\/a>The problem with the approach shown above is that the backplane is just a bit too big. I could cut the top and bottom off it, there isn’t anything important there, but that would spoil it. I’ll keep it for later. Maybe I’ll build an RC2014 ad I’ll need it then.<\/p>\n

As there isn’t anything too complicated about the backplane, I substituted a piece of Vero stripboard instead.<\/p>\n

That fitted much better.<\/p>\n

The CF card adapter.<\/h2>\n

\"\"<\/a>As I mentioned above, Scott Baker has published his PCB design on OSHpark for anyone to order. OSHpark has a minimum order quantity of three and I only wanted one but, someone else only wanted one it seems as a blank PCB appeared on ebay. Yea, here we go.<\/p>\n

The circuit for this card is very simple and it would be very easy to lay it out on the proto card except for the fact that CF card sockets have tiny connectors and really don’t work with 0.1″, through-hole boards. A very good reason to use the RC2014 card.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Here we have the populated CF card adapter plugged into the stripboard backplane.<\/p>\n

Next time I’ll try it out.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have been making good progress with the Interak-1 and having a lot of fun on the way. I have made an adapter so that I can use a modern USB keyboard. I completed the VDU2K video board that was given to me with the machine so now I want to improve its storage. My … Continue reading Interak Compact Flash adapter – Part 1.<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[47,122,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-c93-blog-posts","category-interak","category-c84-retro-tech"],"featured_image_src":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"andy","author_link":"https:\/\/www.randomorbit.co.uk\/?author=1"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.randomorbit.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.randomorbit.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.randomorbit.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.randomorbit.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.randomorbit.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1167"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.randomorbit.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1167\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1192,"href":"https:\/\/www.randomorbit.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1167\/revisions\/1192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.randomorbit.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.randomorbit.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.randomorbit.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}