Dracblade Build

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.

First parts to fit are low profile.

Don't forget the two decoupling caps on the solder side.

All the soldering done, just check the power pins with a multimeter before plugging all the chips in.

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 quick and simple connection for the PropPlug fits in the serial port connections.

The mod with a PropPlug wired in.

Section:

Projects

Tags:

electronics,

Parallax,

Propeller,

CPM

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