Board revision requests

Topics regarding the Uzebox hardware/AVCore/BaseBoard (i.e: PCB, resistors, connectors, part list, schematics, hardware issues, etc.) should go here.
rv6502
Posts: 80
Joined: Mon Feb 11, 2019 4:27 am

Re: Board revision requests

Post by rv6502 »

uze6666 wrote: Thu Oct 17, 2019 3:08 am Label the underside for the EXT connector.
Reasons?
As I was modeling a custom case I realised the back IOs would be better lower so I flipped the entire board upside down.

That kind of solved my problem with the whole not having labels at the bottom.

AND it also gives me a bit more room to make a cartridge connector PCB.

Which now got me thinking about how many signals I can/should bring to the cartridge slot.
Because it'd be really easy to set any pins to input mode and drive the video signal from a "SuperFX" cartridge.
We can go feature-creep-stupid with this :D

Now I just need to cut traces to flip the Player 1 connector and swap P1 & P2 since it's upside down.
Thanks to the gamepad header pins I can rewire this easily.

And put buttons on the underside.
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sIMG_2384.JPG
sIMG_2384.JPG (193.17 KiB) Viewed 5851 times
( I miscalculated the size of the connectors, subtracted the diameter rather than the radius, doh! )

I'll post case progress to a different thread. Just wanted to "for the record" in this thread that I wasn't just making random arm-chair backseat-driver suggestions ;)

And while I'm modding that Uzebox I just thought I could dual-color that LED with a 2nd resistor->LED->VCC on the same GPIO.
They'd both always glow a bit (somewhere below 1/4th with the voltage drop) when set to input but that's fine since we'd want it to be always on at least a bit when powered.
For example could do high=green, low=red, input=both faintly on, 50-50 high-low = both half power on, PWM anything in between.
(or other colors, I'd probably do blue-red gotta check if I have any blues in stock)

I wanted to add another color to see when I was writing vs reading the SD card.
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nicksen782
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Re: Board revision requests

Post by nicksen782 »

Cartridges... add-on hardware ala Super-FX chip. Maybe some games could be straight up Uzebox only games and have support for sd card and spiram. But, an addon into the cartridge slot could add additional hardware. Perhaps it has its own spiram (lots for preloading). Maybe an additional micro to help. Or, let's go crazy for a moment, a framebuffer? Best yet, something whose while job is to update the screen with whatever is current in the frame buffer, for example. NES games had memory mapper controls and other extras. I consider the NES to be retro. Perhaps this is the expansion that Uzebox could use? If there were to be an Uzebox 2 I think it would be important to consider expandability like this.

I've been reading your posts lately and they really do seem like neat ideas. Keep it up!
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