Author: 0 (0)
Date: -0
(this was posted originally here: http://www.dbug-automation.co.uk/forum/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?board=hardware, posts will be gathered there)
Ok, I'm ripping this idea off another forum, but hey!
Here are the facts:
a) We like Alison :)
b) We think she's a great HW developer
c) We dealed with her and we can say that she's an absolutely fantastic, good mannered, proffesional, etc. lady and we'll gladly deal with her anytime :)
d) We want a neat CF to ACSI solution!
e) We want to motivate her to finish WeST
So we're trying to gather as much interest as possible, so she can be motivated to finish it :)
You ask "What's a WeST?". In her own words:
"Ah, WeST. I want one. I just can't get the motivation. This Scart/VGA thing will spark it off if there's interest in it like there was when PeST was launched.
Over the last few days with moving this and that, a WeST would be so handy. It's almost finished. It communicates on both sides, that's the hardest bit and tested, it's just getting it to say the right things which needs to be finished. I kind of have a reputation for doing that, ...enthusiastically starting a project and doing the difficult impossible bits, then losing interest.
WeST, if ever I finish it, is imagined to be about 2inches square!! And that's it! SD card socket on the back. 2.1mm power connecter. I was even having silly ideas of putting a rechargable battery on it so it could run standalone. It draws about 150mA, mainly due to the high MIPS of the MCU. And given that most 4.5v board batteries are something like 400mA I'm wondering if the size could be justified. The whole board would be encased in heatshrink like PeST, and a battery would really mess that up. Could just have a 9v radio battery hanging out if someone wants portable.
I want it to be about 2inches square. And I haven't even had a professional prototype PCB made yet, which would be much larger. Once it's all finalised, it then goes SMD."
and
"I was developing WeST which is a CF card ACSI hard disk interface, just that the newcomers expect to pay like a tenner for it and then start complaining about how much it costs. Fine. Solution is simple. I'll (we'll) do something else. I was getting transfer rates well up to the DMA maximum of 1MB/second. As purely I was proud of what I was doing so put the time into the it's development. It's took months of 8-hour days to develop something that not only worked but had full CRC capability too. Microcontrollers with lots of I/O and which run at 40MIPS ain't cheap!! About £15-20 a go if you're splitting hairs. Now if I was buying them by the thousand then maybe lets say £8-9. The reason why your USB card reader for your PC only cost a tenner is that they made 5-million of the things in China!!!!!!!"
So, if you're serious about getting one, please reply to this post, stating how many interfaces would you be interested to get. I can't get a price quotation at the moment. Maybe in due time. All will depend on demand I guess!
So, get replying ;)
(P.S. the 256 is just a fictional number I made up! Besides, $100 is a round rumber, right? :P )
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The 256 Users for the WeST... new
