mos6507's Blog - Chimera board revision 9.1

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I thought I'd give people a look at the newest Chimera board revision:

 

 

In addition to a test points on an internal header, there are two 10-pin headers. Each 10-pin header supports 4 serial lines (RX, TX, CTS, RTS), power, and some extra signals presented on the right of the dongles.

 

 

Sorry, my camera doesn't do macro well.

 

The serial at the headers is TTL and gets converted to RS232 level by the dongles. So if you want to interface serial devices at TTL, you can still do that by connecting directly to the headers. We are looking at exposing the ARM's SPI and I2C bus through these. Hardware tinkerers will be able to easily solder wires to these connections and send them through the shell which already has holes in that area to accomodate screws.

 

While this board revision has an MMC/SD socket, we've decided to go with a microSD socket for the production board so that the circuit layout doesn't have to be so crowded (which may also be a source of electronic noise). We will also be able to have each header on opposite sides of the cartridge, so the endlabel won't have to be ruined. The microSD slot would be on the side also. It should just fit.

 

Originally I thought MMC was better since people may have old cards sitting around, but low-capacity microSD is dirt cheap. A quick froogle search yielded this, for instance:

 

64MB

 

 

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