A Lisa Inside An FPGA

[AlexTheCat123]

Thanks to a VERY generous loan from my dad, I just placed an order for 50 fully-assembled boards (as well as 10 completely-untested Twiggy breakouts), and I'm planning on bringing them to VCF Southwest to sell. I'm in talks with two well-known distributers in the vintage computing scene, and any boards that don't sell by the end of the weekend at VCF will go to them to be listed on their web stores. Not sure how quickly 50 boards will sell out, but I'm planning on doing more orders in the future once they're gone. I wanted to get more than 50 to start, but JLCPCB only had 54 FPGAs in stock, so the max I could do without having any leftover bare boards was 50.

And of course, if you don't want to buy one from me or them, you can always order some of your own straight from JLC once I put everything on GitHub!

[D.Finni]

They will sell out quickly.

[AlexTheCat123]

Hopefully not too quickly!

[bmwcyclist]

Did I miss where the price was posted?

[AlexTheCat123]

JLC just finished manufacturing the boards, so they should be shipped out pretty soon. Hopefully they'll be here by VCF; it's going to be really close!

I just added a neat feature that very few people will probably ever have a use for, but it comes in handy for me sometimes with LOS experimentation, as well as with Xenix's hard drive size limits. If you connect one of the pins on the GPIO header to 3.3V, then the FPGA will intercept any reads to address FCC030 and always return 88 instead of A8, making software think that it's running on a 2/10 instead of a 2/5. Pretty neat, right?

Did I miss where the price was posted?

Sorry, I completely forgot to respond to you! It's looking like about $300. I really wanted it to be cheaper, but the prices of chips have gone up quite significantly since my last order. Take the FPGA for instance. When I placed my first order back in November, it was $20 apiece, but now it's like $50. And many of the other chips have increased by similar proportions too. It sucks!

[snhirsch]

JLC just finished manufacturing the boards, so they should be shipped out pretty soon. Hopefully they'll be here by VCF; it's going to be really close!

I just added a neat feature that very few people will probably ever have a use for, but it comes in handy for me sometimes with LOS experimentation, as well as with Xenix's hard drive size limits. If you connect one of the pins on the GPIO header to 3.3V, then the FPGA will intercept any reads to address FCC030 and always return 88 instead of A8, making software think that it's running on a 2/10 instead of a 2/5. Pretty neat, right?

Sorry, I completely forgot to respond to you! It's looking like about $300. I really wanted it to be cheaper, but the prices of chips have gone up quite significantly since my last order. Take the FPGA for instance. When I placed my first order back in November, it was $20 apiece, but now it's like $50. And many of the other chips have increased by similar proportions too. It sucks!

Will there be any available for shipment to folks who are not planning to attend VCF?

[AlexTheCat123]

Yep, I'm working with MacEffects and Joe's Computer Museum, and whatever doesn't sell at VCF will be split 50/50 between them for sale on their sites! Once those sell out, I'm planning on doing another batch too.

[AlexTheCat123]

Some bad news.

JLC finished manufacturing the v3 boards on the 18th as expected, but it's been several days and they still haven't shipped. Normally they ship the day after manufacturing is done, but not this time, presumably because of the large size of the order. It's so late at this point that there's no way they'll be here in time for VCF. So if you were coming in the hopes of getting your hands on a board, then I'm sorry! They'll still be for sale online afterwards though.

Regardless, I'll absolutely have the two v2 boards set up at VCF for anyone to play with, so at least there's that, plus my presentation on the entire project.

[AlexTheCat123]

VCF went great and my presentation is up on YouTube now! I honestly don't feel like it's quite up to the standards of some of my previous years because of how much content I had to trim to fit it within the hour and a half that I had, but the lecture hall was completely full and everyone said they really liked it, so maybe I'm just being overly critical.

Regardless, here's the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QSP9Qh0PvU

[bmwcyclist]

It was great! thank you!

[AlexTheCat123]

I'm finally home to mess with the v3 boards and I've got the first one of the 50 fully configured and tested. It looks like it works perfectly, including the serial port muxing, so that's an excellent sign. Now I just need to repeat everything for the other 49 boards, which is going to take quite a while.

The only roadblock I've encountered so far is that my eBay SCCs might indeed be fake and defective. I've only tested one of them so far, but it's so broken that the Lisa refuses to even display an image on the screen with it installed. Switching to a real SCC fixes things. Luckily, I bought some extra SCCs, so hopefully enough of them work to get through all of the boards...

While I was at VCF, I made a form that people could fill out to be notified when the boards go on sale. If anyone on here wants to be notified, I'd suggest filling out that same form too. Given all of the support that I've gotten on here, you guys get priority and will be notified a bit earlier than all of the VCF people if you fill out the form. To indicate that you're coming from here instead of VCF or any other source, put your name followed by "LisaList2" in the First Name field. So my first name would be "Alex LisaList2".

https://forms.gle/i4vdADcm5yNm8XUk7

I'll keep everyone updated as testing progresses!