Pcmcia USB card

[strim]

Originally Posted by jbenam

Maybe a dedicated USB-PCMCIA solution (I know there's request for such thing!) could keep the costs low enough for it to be an interesting proposal?

Possibly, but it is something to think of in the (far) future. I have too much on my head now.

There's also a problem of licensing the USB stack. As far as I remember rights to Poseidon stack were bought by Jens. Considering he just released USB controller, I think he might not want to deal with anyone producing competing product.

Of course, there also ANAIIS, but it is not as full featured as Poseidon.

And it's a lot of programming work to write a proper driver for USB host controller.

[alexh]

Originally Posted by strim

As far as I remember rights to Poseidon stack were bought by Jens.

In 2009 a bounty was raised to pay Chris Hodges to open source Poseidon for use in AROS.

http://www.power2people.org/projects/poseidon/

I've never heard of anyone attempting a back-port to AmigaOS 68k even though the files release were claimed to be 100% backwards compatible with SAS/C for OS3.x

The files are available here :

http://repo.or.cz/w/AROS.git/tree/HEAD:/rom/usb

[K.C.Lee]

The big question is where are the original released SAS files (not the ones modified for the AROS built system)?
You'll also need the documentation of writing the driver for the stack. (saw a SDK mentioned)

The AROS build system is very GCC specific, so the code in the AROS tree would no longer be SAS C compatible as is without some editing.
See thread here: http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=75566 "News about AROS 68k?"

Hopefully it gets back ported at some point and available in a more portable source form.

[Merlin]

Originally Posted by alexh

Looking in the cupboard at work I found the last three 16-bit PCMCIA FPGA devkits.

I can provide the schematics for the boards, the Xilinx pinmap UCF file and possibly an example top-level VHDL file.

I cannot give the design (obviously).

So who wants will use them? You could make your own PCMCIA->USB 1.1 bridge.

There are guys over at AmiBay that could maybe engineer a new version from this information. They may also be members on here too, e.g. Bryce, Sweetlilmre and Ginny Flick and others.

Would you be prepared to pass the info on, for them to have a crack at it?
You could send it to me if you like and I'll see if they are interested. Thanks.

[K.C.Lee]

Let's hope the FPGA devkit is built with a bit newer FPGA. PCMCIA is old, so the FPGA might near EOL if not already there. Even 3.3V I/O seems to be going away too. I moved to 3.0V I/O for the FPGA in my board to make things a bit more rugged.

There is always the option of making buffered clock ports available and let the users buy USB dongles from someone else.

[K.C.Lee]

FYI: found FTDI FT313H chip when search for the ISP1763A. Both chips are High speed capable USB Hosts with 16-bit bus.

findchips.com shows FTDI chip is *cheaper* at $3.08 at single quantity! ISP chip not even shown in stock. http://www.findchips.com/search/FT313H

According to FTDI, their register set is much closer to EHCI with some difference in offsets. They have source code for Linux driver.
AROS already had EHCI driver code for their USB stack. So software might not be too bad. (Debugging is another matter.)

"AN_302_Comparison of Software features for FT313H and ST-Ericsson ISP1763.pdf" http://www.ftdichip.com/Support/Docu...%20ISP1763.pdf
Product page: http://www.ftdichip.com/Products/ICs/FT313H.html

Note: Not particular fond of FTDI because of their recent drive update incident, but hey they have the right chip at a good price.

I expect the other guy got the full Poseidon source code, but doesn't have an exclusive license. Chris also sold AROS a license to a subset of the source code. As long as the AROS license terms are followed (i.e open source), there shouldn't be an issue for back porting.