It took me a while, but I finally got back to the STD-85 project and have completed a first round of testing on the board. Overall, I am very happy with the way it turned out and I have not found anything that doesn’t work as expected. There are a few things I will change in a next version, but that is always the case.
The free-form mapping of the memory sockets and the ability to move the ZIF socket anywhere is a really, really nice feature. I also think the little pad-per-hole proto area will be useful for the tinkerers among us and it is nice that the larger form factor of the STD Bus gave us the space.
I have turned my efforts towards documentation and am going to release the build files for others to submit to their favorite board house. This is still considered a prototype and I fully expect there are some hardware bugs that will come to the surface as more people build and work with the board.
Several Pro-Log 77xx memory boards and a Pro-Log 7303 keypad/display board have been used with this STD-85 CPU board. Here is a video with the extent of my testing and what has not been tested.
The documentation is here, please let me know as you find errors and omissions.
As for future STD Bus things, in addition to the protoboard that is already available, I think that I will make a backplane. There is a great extender card / backplane card designed by Will (our 38P70 buddy), you can join the STD Bus facebook group to download those build and design files. However, as I work on resurrecting some of my old STD Cards, I would like to have easier access to bus signals and card guides so I plan on adding those little features to my backplane. I will add another post as I get further in that project.
regards
-Craig
