In my search for CPLD breakout boards I met a new friend in Taiwan. His name is Justin. He is the manufacturer of some neat Xilinx breakout boards for the XC9572XL and XC95144XL CPLD’s.

He sent me some samples. These should come in very handy.

Full size picture – http://www.a2retrosystems.com/images/IIcmxp/CIMG4064.JPG

I treated myself an early present …. I ordered up one of these Logic Analyzers – the LogicPort from Intronix – pcTestInstruments.com. I will let you know how well it works once I something have setup to monitor. I bought 1 extra logic probe set and a set of 20 grabbers.

If you read usenet – c.s.a.2 you will have seen a post by vinchysky@yahoo.com announcing the BlueFlash Controller card. This a CF/Disk II/USB Host and Blue tooth adapter for the IIe. This very cool and he has implemented many of the technoliges I wrote about in my last blog post. It is very nice to see stuff like this come out of the woodwork …. I am in awe and jealous at the same time …. 

A year or so ago I bought a Arium ML4100 logic analyzer off of ebay.

This model was sold from 83 on into the late eighties … one of the reasons i bought it was that it a) cheap ($100) b) I could pick it up locally (its heavy) and c) it came with a 32 channel logic pod.

At the time I did not get around to learning how to use it but along the way I picked up a 6502 processor pod for the little beasty. That POD came with a dip clip that you attach right to the 6502 chip to monitor all the signals (well almost all).

For the last little while I have been contemplating buying some more tools – one I was considering was the Intronix 34 Channel logic analyzer $389. I stil plan to get one but before commiting to that, I decided to give the ML4100 a shake down to see what I could do with it

For a test subject I used one of the Olimex PIC demo boards I bought from Sparkfun and a PIC 18F4550 chip I bought from Digikey in it. I took the sample code to toggle one port, which lit the led and utilized that. I put one of the test leads on and tried to get the LA to trace the signal … it took me a while to zone in the right settings but I managed to dial it in. To confirm I put a second test lead on another PIC port and toggled that right after the first one …. It was pretty cool ….

So far now I will play with what I have … when I want some nice graphics and protocol support (i2c, SPI and RS-232 decode) I’ll pick up the LA1034 ….

I have decided to host my cross platfoirm coding activity in Eclipse. It’s big but useful. I have just been experimenting with CVS and SVN access plugins.It would be cool to write a plugin based on Applewin that would let you complie your programs, have them accessible in a virual ProDOS volume and have the debugger run in a seperate window.

I used to have a blog when my web site was hosted by Rogers.com. I used blogger.com and I  called my blog – A2 Retro Rants. When I switched to Dreamhost …(which is a great hosting company by the way) I did not bring my blog over .. it may still be other there somewhere … I havn’t checked …. I noticed that Dreamhost had  a one click install for WordPress so I thought I would give it a go.

I plan to write about things Apple II related (and other things I find cool in the technical world). I hope you come back to checkin on me every once in awhile …

 Glenn