Tor Arntsen wrote:
I'm curios about what's in that box.. 
Hi Tor,
But, since you asked so nicely...
Our philosophy is minimalist - least hardware doing the maximum.
So, we have in there:
One mini-modular development kit (MDS) eZ80F910200KIT.
One 140x32 VFD Noritake GU140x32F-7003 (5 Volt)
One female PS/2 connector
The VFD is powered by 5 Volts off of the development board (before the 3.3V regulator) with no problem, along with the 5V pin on the PS/2 connector.
The MDS is powered by the standard 'wall-wart'.
The PS/2 works with many PS/2 keyboards, including the keyboard LEDs. We've tried six different kinds, they all work fine, but the nicest fit visually is the BTC5100C (and it's a very solid keyboard).
The VFD is set up in TTL RS232 mode - first it was setup as synch. serial and used SPI at 4Mbit/sec., but the SPI will come in handy for a uSD card. The TTL RS232 from the VFD is multiplexed onto the MDS UART1 TX, with the PS/2 connected to UART1 RX (for reception from the keyboard) . Four MDS GPIO pins set appropriately complete that interface.
The MDS DB9 connector (UART0) can be used for any standard RS232 connection application (like a terminal program, or some equipment needing control/monitoring), or it can be used in another mode to communicate at 781,250 bits/sec over a custom cable with other special-purpose boxes that we make.
The Ethernet is fully working at 100BASETX (the RJ45 is on the back of the box), the PS/2 jack is also on the back, you can see in the picture that the JTAG and XTOOLS debug interfaces are exposed on the front, as well as the DB9 RS232.
The firmware is all-assembler with custom BSP and can concurently run a modified Forth without messing up whatever else is going on (ie, one can switch in and out of the Forth environment).
Regards,
---Joshua
