RE: TI-H: Why expander? Why compress? Use a FDD!
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RE: TI-H: Why expander? Why compress? Use a FDD!
Anything can be done. But there are exceptions on what is sensible. You
would have to buy a $20 disk drive, $20 of flash, $12 controller, lots of
other stuff. Sure it would be cool, and I'd like to help, but I don't
think teachers are going to start using disks on their calculator...
Grant
>here's the deal, I think it can be done. The deal is that the floppy
>drive interface is not parallel, it's serial. That results in a
>drastically simplified system. However, reading a disk all the time is
>very difficult. There was a proposal a while back to use a 2MB memory
>chip to buffer the entire disk, but that's somewhat impractical. what we
>can do is read the FAT onto a memory chip. It would be smaller, and we
>could even use an EEPROM. The one that Bryan used in the EuP was supposed
>to be usable forever, but you would have to refresh the entire array every
>so often. If we get a lower density version of that chip, we're set,
>since the array is reset everytime you change disks!
> To continue, what needs to be added in is something like cal or
>the graphlink software on a chip. It receives data from the link port and
>saves it in standard .8xx format. It's still complex, but doable. there
>are a lot of control pins for the drives, so it's something to think
>about.
> However, I'm not about to call it quits on this project. What we
>need then is that the calculator itself must decode the data, so there has
>to be a bypass from the AVR, so that we can avoid killing the AVR memory.
>Or we could do PCMCIA conversion (still tougher), and connect any
>standardized device.
>Christopher Kalos
>raptorone@stuytech.com
>Executive Director/Administrator
>Virtual Technologies Developer's Group
>
>
>----------
>From: Grant Stockly[SMTP:gussie@alaska.net]
>Sent: Saturday, January 17, 1998 8:27 PM
>To: ti-hardware@lists.ticalc.org
>Subject: RE: TI-H: Why expander? Why compress? Use a FDD!
>
>
>>well, the deal (yet again) is power, and that blasted link port. maybe
>>with an AVR (is there an echo out here?), it will work.
>
>Power and...valuable time! It would take a year or half to get it working!
>
>It would work with the 4414 AVR. I looked into it, but as I think, flash
>is the way to go.
>
>Grant
>
>
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