Projects

Dracblade Build

Last updated: March 25, 2010, 10:04 p.m.

While spending time on the Propeller forums I got involved in an awesome project to make a Propeller based complete Z80 system emulator. There are a few different boards about that are "standard" platforms for extended memory applications, all called blades of some sort. One I particularly liked because of the elegance of the design was the DracBlade. The PCBs were sold through the forum at a very reasonable price, I put mine together from bits from Farnell.

A PCB fitted with low profile components such as chip sockets and an SD card slot First parts to fit are low profile.
A PCB from solder side with two capacitors mounted. Don't forget the two decoupling caps on the solder side.
A fully populate PCB, all IC sockets are empty though. All the soldering done, just check the power pins with a multimeter before plugging all the chips in.
The finished board. All done ready to boot up into CP/M

When I was putting together my board (a Rev 5 board) I decided to bypass the level translator chip for the programmer connection and add a header to attach the standard Parallax Prop Plug programmer. This turned out to be a really easy mod with just a couple of wires to fit and the connector fitted in the 4 lower pins of the DB9 socket footprint which were unconnected to anything else.

A simple mod to allow a 4 pin programmer to be connected instead of a proper serial port. A quick and simple connection for the PropPlug fits in the serial port connections.
A view of the same mod with the PropPlug connected. The mod with a PropPlug wired in.

Section:
Projects
Tags:
electronics,
Parallax,
Propeller,
CPM

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