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Electronics

Today, electronics are inseparable connected with computer technology. Even simple applications are making use of microcontrollers, GALs, CPLDs or FPGAs. And thats good in my opinion, because the use of such devices makes it possible to make cost effective, but very powerful designs of such apps.

On this page, you can have a look on some of my hardware-projects.

It is often not possible for me to put a more detailed description of every project in here, because of the complexity and the lack of time I have. If you are interested in getting more information on a special project, you can send an eMail to me.

QBox A completely from the scratch designed new computer system.
BDMDebug My own BDM debug software
A500Zorro The first working prototype Zorro board for the A500.
SlotZorro A fully working prototype of an autoconfig board for the A2000-A4000.
ZorroBoard V2 A new allround board (under development).
FlashBIOS or: "How to flash a PC FlashBIOS..." :-)
FPGA84dev Testboard for Xilinx Spartan FPGAs
9536dev Testboard for Xilinx XC9536 CPLDs
80535infineon 80535 Board, created for infineon technologies
A500Flash A500-based FlashROM programmer
S-EPROMEmu 'Strange' EPROM Emulator
EPROMEmu Highspeed EPROM Emulator
HC08Programmer 68HC08 flash programmer
Keyboard-Repair How to repair keyboards...
HD-motor Experimental driving circuit for a synchronous harddrive motor
GB60Board A small and universal 9S08GB60 microcontroller board.

Electronics News
electronics
Doing hardware developments, again
Hardware development After having spent quite a lot of my spare time for several software developments, I have started developing hardware, again. By following the title link you can see some pictures of the setup I have worked with recently.
2006-12-31
electronics
GB60Board schematics and layout released
GB60 Even though I've finished this board already at the beginning of the year, I've found no time for a release until today.
I now release the schematics, the layout and a short documentation together with a demonstration firmware to allow a greater audience to get access to the outstanding 9S08 family of microcontrollers from Freescale. I am sorry for the delay and hope that you'll like this project!
2006-06-11
electronics
Universal "GB60Board"
GB60 Some weeks ago I finished my design of a very small, universal microcontroller board powered by the Freescale 9S08GB60 microcontroller. I will publish a whole lot of information about this board within the next time.
2005-12-31
electronics
Experimental driving circuit for a synchronous harddrive motor
HD-motor Some days ago I played around with a killed harddrive's synchronous motor which usually turns the harddrive platters. I asked myself how the driving circuit would look like to bring such a motor to life.
As it sounded like an interesting experiment, I've developed an experimental driving circuit to bring the motor to it's limits. Read more under the title link (incl. video of the experiment)...
2005-05-08
electronics
A tubes amplifier for relaxation...
tubes at night
(click to enlarge)

Versuchsaufbau
(click to enlarge)
When you have heavy stress in your daily life, a nice and warm open fire can bring an excellent relaxation. Due to the lack of a fireplace and a fire I decided to cope with stress electronically:
By using a selfmande tubes amplifier (it does glow at least)! ;-)

On the left you can see the first minutes of my prototype.
The sound quality surely cannot compete with high-end amplifiers but it is enormous impressive, though.

At the beginning, it showed a noticeable noise which I could track down to a tendence to oscillate at VHF at about 110MHz. After suppressing this characteristic, the amplifier now produces a crystal clear signal!

I'm looking forward to enjoy MP3s at evenings in the future!

BTW: 18 watts of power is needed to heat the tubes alone!! ;-)
2003-10-24
electronics
How to repair keyboards...
If you have a broken keyboard where one ore more keys don't respond properly, anymore, then you should read my description how to repair it in a clean way. Read more under the title link.
2002-12-23
electronics
How to flash a PC FlashBIOS... :)
Flashing a PC BIOS is simple? Not always... Not in my case... Read this short story about a really unconventional way to solve this normally quite simple task... ;)
2000-08-06
qbox
ColdFire 5206e PCB Layout released
On public request, you now can download the PCB Layout I used for the ppQBox ColdFire CPU-board. For more information, follow the title link.
2000-07-06
electronics
Amiga Autoconfig Boards
Incredible: by cleaning up my "hardware-development-table", I found a very old hardware-design of a A500 ZorroII-Board I made for testing the Amiga Autoconfig. There is also a newer version for the A2000-A4000.
2000-05-23
win
BDMDebug V1.02 released
Some problems have been fixed. It should now work on WinNT, too.
2000-04-01
win
BDMDebug V1.00 released
This is a powerful Windows based (sorry for this!!!) BDM Debug Tool for Motorola ColdFire CPUs. If you're a developer of hardware designs using this type of CPU, this tool is a "must-have"... :)
2000-03-14
qbox
Now I can program my ppQBox in C!!
My brother Christian succeeded in making a GNU C ColdFire cross compiler for my SUN.
But this is only the halve thing. The output' ELF-file is not a directly runnable executable file. The platform using it needs a loader for it.
After about 2 days of searching for ELF-manuals, analyzing the output and programming the loader I'm now happy to tell you, that I now have no problems to run C-programs on my ppQBox. Now it should be much more easy to go on with developing the QOS... my own Operating System for the (pp)Qbox... :)

After finishing the network-hardware and adding a small speaker to the board (for some noisy output... :) ), I'm now working on the network software between my Amiga and the ppQBox. It's development state is about 75%, I think. I already have packet transmission between both computers and looking forward to finish the whole thing in some days.
2000-02-29
win
BDMDebug finished
BDMDebug This my ColdFire BDM-Debug interface control program. I had to program it for Wind*ws because I get the needed DLL-file for controlling the interface only there. I'm sure I will make later an Amiga-port of this. I will release this tool it in the next days. More about it you find here.
2000-02-29
electronics
Amiga AutoConfig(TM) Card
On request, I have added an image with infos about my autoconfig card prototype.
1999-12-05
qbox
The ppQBox mainboard!!
ppQBox Mainboard Jippieh!! :) 3 weeks after creating the CPU-board, I successfully finished the mainboard for my ColdFire computer!
The Board has a lot of interesting features: 256kB buffered (GoldCap) high-speed SRAM, 1-64MB PS/2 DRAM, network interface for data exchanges between my Amiga and the ppQBox, programmed GAL's for some IO, two proprietary expansion slots for additional hardware (HardDisk, Sound, IO, GFX, PCI-Slots).
More photos/infos...
1999-03-21
qbox
Fantastic ColdFire results: The first working CPU-board!
CF5206e first run
This picture is a photo of the soldered and finished board!
You can read a detailed description of the development process of it here.
1999-02-24

This is the print version. Back to normal view