Mike's PCjr Page

Okay, if I put these together I'm definitely going to try to go with shielded cable and the proper connectors. TE, for whatever reason, has discontinued the upper shielding for the connector, but still produces (or at least still has a lot of stock of) the lower shielding, but I have found a place where I can get full shielding kits for the connectors (should come with lower shielding, upper shielding, and crimp-on ferrule, if I'm reading it correctly). I think my idea for a skinny board with a right-angle connector will probably not work, as I don't think the connector will stick far enough off the end to make good contact with the PCjr.

I would also want one.

I'm leaning toward producing the boards without the ICSP header. That means the PIC chips will have to be removed to be programmed or reprogrammed, but the final product will be much smaller and neater than with the extra IC and 6-pin header.

MikeModified wrote:I'd buy at least one @ $25.00.

I agree with Mike - I'd buy one too. Eventually, it would be fun to make my own.

This is like the AT/PS2 to XT adapters I bought from hargle - there is no end to their usefulness.

<*> Jim

For me, cost isn't much of an issue- convenience is. I don't care if they are pretty, but having them stable without loose wires sticking up and waiting to get yanked off is bad.
I have done several runs of kits for the original XTIDE and the XT2AT keyboard converter, and the lesson I learned there is go with a minimum of 10 units, especially since you might be able to get a price discount on buying parts in bulk.
Just because only 3 have been sold today doesn't mean that others won't come upon this later on and want to buy them too. These things shouldn't take up much space in your closet to wait until another buyer comes in.

If money is tight, I am happy to even fund the entire run of 10 units to get the ball rolling.

Hargle wrote:For me, cost isn't much of an issue- convenience is. I don't care if they are pretty, but having them stable without loose wires sticking up and waiting to get yanked off is bad.
I have done several runs of kits for the original XTIDE and the XT2AT keyboard converter, and the lesson I learned there is go with a minimum of 10 units, especially since you might be able to get a price discount on buying parts in bulk.
Just because only 3 have been sold today doesn't mean that others won't come upon this later on and want to buy them too. These things shouldn't take up much space in your closet to wait until another buyer comes in.

If money is tight, I am happy to even fund the entire run of 10 units to get the ball rolling.

I was just about to say I was going to look into the cost of making 10 units, since I'll have 10 boards. The only difficult parts to get will be the connector shielding kits. I did find a source for them, though, with reasonable pricing and a reasonable minimum order, so it probably would make sense to at least order 10 of those kits at once.

Okay, if I make 10 at once, I can make my money back on 6 of them at a $25 apiece sale price. That sounds reasonable to me since we have 4+ people interested in 5+ units at the moment. But that does mean the run's going to cost $140 to $150 up front, so if any of you do want to help with the up-front cost, send me a private message and we'll talk about it (I hate to ask like that, but I haven't landed a job for after graduation yet so I don't know how long what I've got in the bank is going to last me at the moment).

My Digikey order came in today, so I got to try the program on the 8-pin PIC. Good news is it worked just as I had already ported it, so I didn't need to change any of the code past what I had already done. Bad news is that even with the external oscillator, the PCjr is still not receiving the occasional keystroke correctly. I'm hoping shielded cable will make up for the rest of it. If not, I'm afraid we'll just have to live with a missed scan code every three or four sentences, because the only way the timing would get any tighter would be for me to rewrite the PCjr output routine in assembly, and figuring out how to successfully add an assembly routine to a C program isn't something I think I'd be up for at the moment.

MikeModified has sent me a message regarding funding for the initial run of boards, so hopefully we will get the ball rolling soon on these.

Alright, everything has now been ordered except for the connectors. I thought the connectors were going to be an online checkout, but apparently they don't have credit card processing set up, so I will have to wait for them to call me at the time of shipment to pay for those.

EDIT: I mean connector shielding. Mouser had the actual connectors in stock.

jmetal88 wrote:Bad news is that even with the external oscillator, the PCjr is still not receiving the occasional keystroke correctly.

Are these chips re-programmable? If so, it won't be a problem to implement code fixes. Even if you have to replace a $2-3 chip for an upgrade - not a big deal.

jmetal88 wrote:MikeModified has sent me a message regarding funding for the initial run of boards, so hopefully we will get the ball rolling soon on these.

Yay! Kudos to Mike - he beat me to it.

<*> Jim