I/O Port ProtoBoard

  • Craig Andrews
  • Category Prototype, Serial - Parallel I/O

The SBC-85 backplane prototyping board has been a hit and, at least from what moves through here, goes out the door at a rate far higher than any other SBC-85 circuit board. Evidently there is a lot of home-brew prototyping going on which is great!

A useful complement to the backplane mounted prototyping board is an expansion port mounted prototyping board which is now in the works and will soon be available.

Just like the original backplane prototype board, this has plenty of pad-per-hole prototyping area with well marked (and differently shape pads for) power and ground rails.  There a couple of major differences from the backplane prototyping board.  The first is that this board has a 26-pin header to connect to either the SBC 8155 I/O port or to the new Serial-Parallel I/O card.  The second addition is that this board has buffered LED displays of all 24 port signals (of course 22 from the 8155).

In the image above, the two 26 pin headers are connected in parallel but the signal is tapped in-between by the buffers used to drive the LED displays to show the I/O signal levels.  While the bottom header connects to the I/O port, the top header is a take-off point for wire wrapping or point-to-point into the pad-per-hole prototype area.

I expect to receive the first build of these in the next week or ten days and if they look good they should make it to tindie and ebay shortly thereafter.