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Documentation about the Vampire hardware

Expansion Ports On the Vampire?

Olle Haerstedt

Posts 110
28 Aug 2019 18:37


Hello!

Are there any expansion ports available on the Vampire, making it possible to plug in extra cards?

Olle


Roy Gillotti

Posts 517
28 Aug 2019 18:52


Olle Haerstedt wrote:

Hello!
 
  Are there any expansion ports available on the Vampire, making it possible to plug in extra cards?
 
  Olle

There is an expansion port on the V500 V2+ and more on the V4. On the V2 it's mostly to prove an SPI interface for an off the shelf SPI Ethernet adapter.

on the V4 perhaps it will be used for some other uses, either way what ever these ports are used for will need drivers made and such.


Mike Kopack

Posts 268
28 Aug 2019 19:03


What Ray said. It's not a "slot" for plugging in cards. Rather they are sockets for plugging in ribbon connectors. I'm using one on my V2 500 for the ethernet adaptor.

The V4 has 3 such adapter sockets on it's board.  (see the picture here: EXTERNAL LINK it's the 3 rectangular black sockets on the right side)

The hope is that at least the following can be added through these sockets:

1) floppy drive interface(s)
2) Wifi adapter. (similar to how we're doing ethernet on the V2 now)
3) ??? What else would folks like to see?  Serial Ports? Parallel Ports?  Midi interface?

If it's SPI then it should be possible to do stuff like interface to a RasPi or Arduino...

But yeah, drivers would need to be written...


Mike Kopack

Posts 268
28 Aug 2019 19:25


Also, if you need to be able to plug in cards (like Zorro) then your best bet is one of the V2 A500 boards installed into an A2000...
 
  There's no Vampire for A3000 or 4000 (yet), so those are no go.
 
  With the V4 standalone and the A1200 you're limited to those sockets from my previous post.
 
  As far as the floppy drives go, we would need something that sits between the Vampire and the floppy drives that can act as an SPI-->Amiga floppy bridge.  The Amiga RPi Drive project might provide some guidance on how to do this, but it goes the other way around - it has some circuitry to listen to the Amiga's floppy connector interface and then talk to a RasPi which acts as an emulated drive.
 
  EXTERNAL LINK 
  Maybe we could use something like this to drive things in the reverse?  We'd need to provide +5V from somewhere else though since I don't believe it's provided anywhere on the V4 board (I could be wrong about that though...) with a reasonably high current level needed by the floppy drive (relatively speaking).

(Edit, and yes, it's a VERY slow day here at the office for me!)


Olle Haerstedt

Posts 110
28 Aug 2019 23:02


Nice, thanks for the great replies!


Vojin Vidanovic
(Needs Verification)
Posts 1916/ 1
29 Aug 2019 08:23


I have Castweasel mk2 anniversary edition
that exploits IDE port and has OS3 drivers (got it for A1-x1000)

Its hard to find, but might be exactly what is needed.

At Vesalia (None avail)
EXTERNAL LINK 
At Individual Comp
EXTERNAL LINK 
At AHB EXTERNAL LINK

posts 6