Building an 'updated KI-10' 40+ years later

 Wow! 6 years have elapsed since my last post, and mostly since I last worked on it.

I have forgotten many things I was working on. Reading my own blog is helping!

I say mostly, because I have been seriously working on parts of the project for a couple of months now.

There are SO many things to do, but I have made some interim decisions, and done some engineering work.

I am going to pursue the course of 74HCTxx and where necessary for speed 74LSxx chips.

I am going to pursue using the Camac crate I have as the frame to build my project in.

This box has 25 slots for cards that are approximately 7.5” by 12”, so there’s a fair amount of real estate available.

There is a “Camac dataway” which I am hoping to turn into my register/memory/IO “unibus”, with enough extra lines so I can do addressing and control?

I have received a generous donation [ from Andreas Ruben at Weiner US ] of old Camac cards whose “rails” I can use when I start my prototype cards. This will allow me to not have to manufacture the hardware, so I can just pursue the design and acquisition of the solderable prototyping

I have purchased more 74HCTxx and 74LSXX chips, and enough AS6C4008 512k x 8 Static CMos Ram to construct a 4 MWord memory.

I have reached out to, and started to get some samples of pushbutton switches for a console.

I have started actually using KiCad [ a Cern developed Circuit design Cad tool] and made progress on my prototype board. We used these back in the day to build on off circuits at Fermilab.

They are not really available anymore, so I’m going to try to have some manufactured. This is what one looked like: [ This company wanted something like $1500 for this one

I am hoping to get 50 of them for about $1000.00, or about $20 each. These are approximately 7 x 12 and can hold 50 or more IC’s. In a production mode with designed traces, you could get 100 IC’s on one.

And here is a partial of how far I’ve gotten with the design of the new one. As you can see, I’m kida-sorta pretty far along and quite excited about it!

I had to stop, because I need to figure out if I can adjust the power supplies on my Camac crate, so that the ‘on-board’ power regulation will be needed.

Camac standard voltages  were +-6v +-12v and +-24v. They were developed before stand IC’s started really using +5v and +-15v. If I can adjust the main power supply for the crate, we’ll need less board based adjustment.

I will pursue a bus based set of registers with tri-state output ‘bus-drivers’ to reduce or eliminate the large amount of and-or gates used to control the data flow in the original KI10. Separately there will be open collector drivers for the lights, so we will still be able to see data flow in the registers.

Finally, ‘I think finally for now’, 3D printing IS A THING. I am going to use it so that I can get a console similar to the original, and several other places so that I can have LIGHTS and buttons!

I hope to be updating more regularly. Still yet to retire, but I’m working on the ‘retirement project’.