New Project: IECSwitch

I can’t claim a significant amount of creativity, but over the past few years, two folks have dropped off “VIC-Switch”-like devices in hopes that I could reverse engineer them.  THese are devices used back in the day (typically in schools) to share a single disk drive or disk and printer with up to 8 computers. I long ago drew up schematics of the existing designs, but wanted to freshen up the solution instead of just creating a replica.

Well, as it goes, finding time takes time, but I decided to try my hand at a new design, and here is the current result.  It’s not much at present, though I can enable/disable IEC ports, and “hold” the 64 from timing out the bus request.  Yes, that’s an LCD there.  I found a great price on them, and I think that’ll be in the final design.  It’s only marginally cheaper than a 7 segment LED or two, and much more interactive then a few LEDs.

It’s been awhile since I developed firmware, and this gave me a chance to clean the cobwebs off my programming skills.