Micro Vibe

With summer behind me it's time to get back to my hobby projects. This article is meant as a brief update to the MIC80 project. When I last worked on the MIC80 project I was attempting to create a simple PC board carrier for the Zilog EZ80 SBC used by the MIC80 project. The short of it is I need more practice using the PC board software before I will be able to get a carrier board done.

To that end I started the Squish Play project. My aim is to develop a simple hardware based project that I can use to cut my teeth on the PC board layout and design processes. Once I go through the complete layout, design and production of the simple PC board for the Squish Play project I will attempt to complete the first PC board for the MIC80 project.

I want to add a simple removable (CPM disk) storage device to the MIC80 project. I plan to use the 2MB data flash chips from ATMEL for the storage device. The data flash is an SPI device and will be connected to the EZ80 SPI port. At this point I have prototyped a connection to the Zilog development board and have begun to develop the BIOS extensions to handle the device as a CPM2.2 disk drive. I think this should be a good addition to the MIC80 project.

My hope is to have the Squish Play project wrapped up in the next few weeks so I can get back to the MIC80 project. More later...