CD32 Expansion Riser

[alenppc]

Kipper was selling tons of them, even on this board, it was fairly easy.

[Bprepared]

Originally Posted by alenppc

What I am discovering recently however is that a ton of people don't own a riser. Which is strange, I thought everybody got theirs years ago, so it'd be nice to have an open design to build these as well.

I'm about 70% done with my design, hoping to get it finished within the next week and off to the board house. I'll release the basic specs once that occurs, and all things going well during initial testing I will open up the sources (they will be KICAD I'm afraid rather than Eagle) along with those of the planned future developments so that everyone can come and play if they want to.

[alenppc]

Originally Posted by Bprepared

I'm about 70% done with my design, hoping to get it finished within the next week and off to the board house. I'll release the basic specs once that occurs, and all things going well during initial testing I will open up the sources (they will be KICAD I'm afraid rather than Eagle) along with those of the planned future developments so that everyone can come and play if they want to.

Excellent, as long as we get gerbers I am happy. Still can't quite figure out how to use eagle (haven't tried KiCad yet)

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by alenppc

Kipper was selling tons of them, even on this board, it was fairly easy.

I'm not going to add any further than this comment, but plenty of people tried to buy from Kipper myself included, with no reply, so it wasn't easy at all.

[solidcore]

Well, it's an exciting time my riser boards are about 40% done in the board house now. Unfortunately, The reason I didn't invest in adding features other than passthrough's is simply that I don't have a working riser board to ensure my soldering of the tf328 works or not so I'd do myself more harm trying to add complexity and be torn between is it the tf328 OR the riser board lol. Saying that however all is not lost...

• Rev2 may have a sata passthrough for futureproofing the possibility of sata tf328s
• Add-on will likely be soldered on solution over existing edge connector pinout (compatible with OTHER riser cards if space permits) with features such as 'USB Mouse', PS/2 KB, RGB, as and when I complete all 3 as prototypes. The respected owners of any pic firmware will be contacted and if with their permission I'll distribute with a programmed PIC, if not, an empty pic socket will be available and at the author's discretion to release his code/hex or yours to obtain and program the pic yourself. (Unfortunately, I won't have much time to make my own usb driver on a PIC)

Total cost per riser ends up being about 9 GBP in total, which is a fair price, I'll sell whatever is left for around that price plus shipping with options such as a bare board, a unsoldered kit, or soldered.

Photos + Testing will come shortly...

@Bprepared I look forward to testing
@Amigajay I was late to the party and unfortunately when I googled for riser cards the other week all were out of stock, pushing me to enjoy the beauty of Eagle and making my own lol... sourced the edge connectors on arrow (free delivery in 2 days) and spent a little longer than i should designing a passive board but I wanted to be sure it was all good (thanks to Bprepared), although saying that I could of fudged things up since he took a look at it lol

[solidcore]

Bad news . Arrow and FedEx ended up charging 20 pound charges guess it wasn't free after all .

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by solidcore

Bad news . Arrow and FedEx ended up charging 20 pound charges guess it wasn't free after all .

I'm sorry, I didn't want to mention it before because maybe there was some change I was unaware of since I left the UK, but those fuckers are terrible for shipping anything to the UK. They will charge you import duties and "handling fees" even for items that should not pay any.

Fedex is specially terrible among all private couriers. You should avoid them like the plague. I don't even use it in the US, it's the worst.

[alenppc]

My experience is that any courier will charge an arm and a leg. For example, when I got my batch of faulty 328 PCBs, I had to pay $2 in customs fees + $15 processing fees for DHL. All for boards that I couldn't even use at the end of the day.

[Amiga1992]

Yeah, I agree. I try to stick to official/national carriers. They usually get a bad rep but it is my experience that they work the BEST out of all options in any country, and end up being the less prone to problems and cheapest average.

Anyway, way OT, but sorry you had that experience solidcore.

[plasmab]

My current batch of TF328s had a £50 DHL customs charge on them.

[solidcore]

Yeah guys lesson learned.

@plasmab yeah i saw your statement in regards to DHL so I went for e-packet, hope I don't hit any charges, I expect not with 15-30 days snail crawl lol, hope you've recovered costs on those boards mate bloody lovely things esp the gold it looks really high quality and I can read the text on these boards! oh and I received 2 today in my post from you, so thank you mate. great quality and enjoyed your stream tonight.

I also just want to say it's the 'terriblefire' in you that keeps the community burning and brings us all together, making friends here appreciate your work, I hope in 2018 I'm programming cpld's and fpgas, what DIY board are you using for the cpld's mate or is it all emulated in software on the PC.

Thanks
Chris.

[supaduper]

Its great your going to get into the programming and that bud ..really interesting stuff, and great vid tonight By Steve really enjoyed it and he sorted it no problem..thanks to diagrom

[solidcore]

Thanks fella baby steps, I will try get that keyboard pic thanks to kipper for uploading it, it will be a prototype on the back of my edge connector for now and then eventually it will be a pcb solder on piggy-back board for all edge risers (see: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ZAMeAdUEUS...RetroFixes.jpg for example of my idea) which I hope to also include RGB/ other stuff throughout this year . Once all thats out the way I will then reinvest my time into the CPLD/FPGA world hehe. Already excited to learn and learning I am with this project, soldering the tf328's and so on I mean who wouldn't become more confident after SMD soldering that 64 pin CPLD haha... love it, next challenge in soldering please ? :P

l

[FOL]

Originally Posted by solidcore

Already excited to learn and learning I am with this project, soldering the tf328's and so on I mean who wouldn't become more confident after SMD soldering that 64 pin CPLD haha... love it, next challenge in soldering please ? :P

l

The smaller the better, I love soldering tiny grains of sand, . Even if it doesn't work, damn it looks sexy, lol.

[solidcore]

hehe yeah I know, I'll be iphone microscopic level soon enough lol.

[Daedalus]

Even Royal Mail will charge you import fees these days that are comparable to those from couriers. No escaping it really - the joys of overseas ordering. At least it doesn't apply for orders from within the EU... For now...

[solidcore]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

Even Royal Mail will charge you import fees these days that are comparable to those from couriers. No escaping it really - the joys of overseas ordering. At least it doesn't apply for orders from within the EU... For now...

or Japan - I bought a lot of famicom's on ebay recently so I can confirm that i think its up to 120 pounds or so.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by solidcore

or Japan - I bought a lot of famicom's on ebay recently so I can confirm that i think its up to 120 pounds or so.

you can still get stung for UK VAT on anything £15-£135 on imports outside the EU, it's customs duty alone that can be upto £135.

[solidcore]

Damn world ! So expensive .

Anyone hit with charges from pcbway epacket ?

[plasmab]

Originally Posted by solidcore

Damn world ! So expensive .

Anyone hit with charges from pcbway epacket ?

If your order value is over £20 then you will get hit unless someone in one of the postal services screws up.