Hi folks. I am currently visiting with Rob Blessin here at Darkness Mansion! I have seen more NeXT gear in the last few days than most will see in a lifetime.
We've been discussing a couple of things I'm working on, and making plans for more.
The DSP SRAM is progressing well. I ordered a second revision of the PCB to clean up some signals due to weirdness in the design of some NeXT boards. Those are at home waiting for me when I get back there next week.
I have done a good chunk of the work of characterizing the NBIC chip, and will likely be able to have some test hardware in the coming couple of months. At the very least I hope to release a true prototyping board with on board NBIC compatible device in a similar timescale.
I also have a NeXT 8) board in for recap/repair and unfortunately the clock chips I ordered from a usually reliable supplier were counterfeit. Hopefully there will be genuine chips waiting for me when I get home.
I have made some modest progress in making a significantly faster SCSI upgrade and think it will fit both cubes and slabs.
Finally, when I get home I will describe a very special project I have planned after talking with Rob. It is something very unique and will be a new high point in NeXT black hardware.
I hope this gets the juices flowing. 8)
Hello NeXT Community: It has been a loft of fun having a compadre here at the Black Hole and sorting out the vortex of NeXT Products and discussing plans for implementing all of the Uber cool NeXT projects and endeavors. Also Dave found afun article I had forgetten about writing for NeXT In Line..... which has truly inspired me to continue carrying the torch for the NeXT community :)
I'm no longer Pix'o'the'net to Rob. I'm Sir Pixelot of Dorkington-Nerdley, the Starbucks Knight and general Doer Of Things...
Thank you Sir Pixelot , it was a jolly good time , safe travels . Peace out Sir Rob keeper of the Cubes, Torch bearor of the NeXT Community in the land of Fort Fun Colorado.
I am home from my epic road trip of epicness. It was suitably epic.
The next couple of days I will be doing some work on my off grid solar system and then I will be back to testing the new revision of the DSP RAM card. The updated PCBs came in while I was away and they are waiting expectantly on my workbench :)
Rob Blessin has also sponsored a project you might all be interested in. A custom 8-slot NeXT Cube with external PSU and drive enclosure. He has donated two cube chassis to this project, so thank you Rob. The project will all be open hardware so people will be able to make an 8 slot backplane and their own custom frames. There will also likely be a 15 slot bench top backplane though this will require a very custom case or chassis to work as it will by definition be huge - 12 x 12 x 25" at least! Cooling and ventilation practicalities suggest it should be an open frame chassis.
What have y'all created or come up with while I was driving through 10 states?
OH DEAR LORD that sounds amazing. PLEASE start a thread and give us pictures/updates as you tinker. Better yet, VIDEOS of your work and progress. That sounds so super cool. KUDOS for the project!
If you give up one of the slots, there's room for an internal floppy and two SCSI HDs.
One thing I will be investing a lot of time in is thermal modeling to get the airflow right. Part of this is to allow extra space above the CPU to allow much better cooling for the CPU board.
Another idea I am considering is a replacement backplane that supports half height and full height NeXTBus cards, so you can use full height cards or we could make new cards that are more compact. When I have enough plans together to start a thread I'll lay out the requirements and considerations and we can all share discussion about the flexible areas.
I don't know how many I can make. I can convert existing cases, but getting spare cases might be quite difficult and expensive. So apart for machines sent in for the mods, it might be a situation where there might only be a half dozen new systems made in original Cube frames.
To be clear, the changes will be non-destructive and the cubes would be restorable to their original condition.
For now, I need to make some progress on my off-grid solar system. I don't know if I can take another five day outage at 10F in a state that is normally 40F in winter,
Is this primarily to be able to have multiple Cube CPU boards in one chassis? I'm no expert, but other than the NeXT Dimension and a few other examples, is there enough variety and quantity of NeXTBus cards to need that many slots? If so, I'm missing out!
My initial thoughts was the constant murmur of people who hoard dimension cards and want to use ALL of them. However, when doing an initial schematic for a Ultra-SCSI 160 card I quickly realized using a huge 4 layer board requires a large built in cost for a massively oversized PCB. I looked at the idea of doing half or 1/3rd height cards, but the DIN 41612-96 really requires /2. Since I can design a backplane that has full height slots along the bottom, and half height slots along the top, so any physical gap can take a single full height or two half height cards, there is a way for everyone to be happy. The whole top section of bus would be electrically disconnected if not installed or in use, or buffered if it is.
Since I plan to develop at least a SCSI and fast Ethernet card, plus some kind of huge RAMdisk board, it does look like a few people might have valid reasons to go outside the 4 board limit of the current cube layout.
The Cube chassis was DEFINITELY designed to support 8 slots. The PSU definitely wasn't, and the storage bay above it also wasn't.
My main challenge in designing such a backplane will be controlling signal quality as the bus lengthens, though weirdly a plain 8-slot backplane will have a shorter bus than the existing wonky design!
I planto have a prototyping board/interface available in the next couple of months based on a deconstruction of the NBIC. My hope is that this combined with some more approachable documentation and some design support from me might encourage others to produce some new hardware too. For example, I'd really like to do or see a fast SD card storage solution so the system could be much, much quieter and boot 6x faster.