SimmSticks - Why?

I have been out of the hardware scene for a while.

While getting up to speed, I have noticed that the "SimmSticks" seem to be insanely popular.

Perhaps I am just missing the obvious - however, I have some questions:

  1. Many Simm sockets have a minimum life expectancy of 25 insertions. After that you are on borrowed time. Has anyone noticed a problem in this area during prototyping?
  2. I don't see what the spectacular advantage is over using the little .100 single and dual headers and stacking the boards together. Back in the day (> 10 years) this was *the* method we used for Z80 and 68HC11 boards and I/O.

If we were protyping, we let friction hold them together. For permanent use, we fastened them together with standoffs.

  1. Lastly, in this modern day of space travel and microwave ovens, why hasn't SPI or I2C become the bus of choice for uC projects. No backplane required, few wires, almost unlimited I/O address range...

I'm probably doing a lot of point missing. Cal C.

Reply to
Cal Craughton
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How many times are you going to install memory in a system? ANd no, I haven't.

Reply to
Richard Henry

In a fit of lucidity, Richard Henry mumbled:

Sir, the clue-train is approaching the crossing and blowing its horn. That is, I think he was referring to "simmsticks" as in

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I don't use them myself. Real Men still wirewrap below 1GHz.

Reply to
Ron Tomas

[...]

SimmSticks aren't (necessarily) memory. See

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Never used them, myself. Regards,

-=Dave

--
Change is inevitable, progress is not.
Reply to
Dave Hansen

ROFL... Now that I can agree with. Still one of the fastest prototyping methods, _if_ you have a power wrapper. Mine dates back to 1979 and still gets regular use...

Chris

Reply to
Chris Quayle

I have heard of these. I didn't think anyone actually used them.

Reply to
Richard Henry

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we have had them on the market for about 7 years.

socket endurance?

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you can do this with these boards too, you don't have to use the sockets at all. There is a row of holes behind the edge connector see:

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yes, cable clamps or whatever, we do this too.

SimmStick uses these buses also, as well as several third party products that have USB on a SimmStick.

Hundreds of thousands of these boards have now been sold. Editorial staff at N&V, and Circuit Cellar have also used them. First commercially available proto boards for the AVR family was a SimmStick.

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for the AVR family is directly supported by Imagecraft C, Codevision C, and Bascom AVR.

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Don McKenzie  E-mail:    http://www.dontronics.com/e-mail.html
              Home Page: http://www.dontronics.com

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Reply to
Don McKenzie

no, I

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they work well. easy to assemble and use.

Alex

Reply to
Alex Gibson

Nah. Power wrappers are for wusses.

I tend to think of wirewrapping as knitting for nerds. I love it. ;)

I shall wirewrap a sweater one day...

Steve

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Reply to
Steve at fivetrees

I've tried some power wrappers, I still prefer a hand tool.

But it _is_ knitting for nerds. I'm about to knit an 8 MHz V20 (NEC

8088+) for no sane reason. Strictly junkbox parts, including a 64k ZX-81 RAM card converted to 512k and an 80M hard drive. I've always wanted a retro system with a blinky LED front panel. Once it's working, I'll probably write a web server for it and submit it to Slashdot for destruction. Wheeee! (A "pièce de résistance" in the original meaning.)

Strange perhaps, but I have friends who knit chainmail while watching TV.

--
Ron Sharp.
"Bring in the logic probe!"
Reply to
Android Cat

I still love the old slit-n-wrap. Alas, it got a bad reputation from people who didn't follow the instructions. If you calibrate the tension at the start of the spool and halfway through, you never get a bad wrap.

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--
Guy Macon, Electronics Engineer & Project Manager.  Remember Doc Brown 
from the 'Back to the Future' movies?  Do you have an "impossible" 
engineering project that only someone like Doc Brown can solve? 
Check out my resume at http://www.guymacon.com/resume.html/
Reply to
Guy Macon

I think that one of the main reasons is that an engineer who has tried several dontronics products and has found that they are all well-documented, well-supported and a good fit for most projects with have a tendency to buy the next new dontronics product.

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BTW, here is another tiny computer that I like a lot:

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--
Guy Macon, Electronics Engineer & Project Manager.  Remember Doc Brown 
from the 'Back to the Future' movies?  Do you have an "impossible" 
engineering project that only someone like Doc Brown can solve? 
Check out my resume at http://www.guymacon.com/resume.html/
Reply to
Guy Macon

Don't forget the high resistance R2R ladder DAC on buffered/latched address and data lines, feeding the XY of your scope and a stereo audio amplifier. A retro system without that wouldn't do at all!

--
Guy Macon, Electronics Engineer & Project Manager.  Remember Doc Brown 
from the 'Back to the Future' movies?  Do you have an "impossible" 
engineering project that only someone like Doc Brown can solve? 
Check out my resume at http://www.guymacon.com/resume.html/
Reply to
Guy Macon

There are limits. After all, I'm not adding data/address toggle switches. It has to fit a 8"x6"x2.5" Pactec case (except for the hard drive) and a small card (except for the RAM card). Besides, the QIX arcade board already has stereo DACs (and an RS232 port). :^P

It really is turning out to be a retro project. My old EPROM programmer software uses timing loops for an XT, so I'll have to take out the loops. Sourcer (disassembler) doesn't want to run in Windows even in DOS mode, so I'll have to configure a 486 as a MSDOS box. You see, this is really just a plot to justify all the junk I keep in the basement.

This started out as a hobby project to get away from it all. As Rocky tells Bullwinkle, "that trick never works!"

--
Ron Sharp.
"Nothing up ma sleeve, presto!"
Reply to
Android Cat

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