Z180 PPC-4 SBC

[David Richards]

Greetings everyone,

I found this board at a sale today for a give away price and thought it could be an interesting platform for a diy project.

It looks as if it has 4x RS485 ports driven by a multi io chip type z85c3010. there is lots of ram and an eprom.

If I can suss the i/o addresses then it may be possible to use the '485 ports for a console and run basic, forth or cp/m. Alternatively it may be a usable system as it is.

I see something similar is still in production as a protocol converter, does anybody have any more info about this board please?

Kind regards, David.

[Fredrik Axtelius]

Looks like they still are in business. https://www.kksystems.com/

--frax

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[Alan Cox]

The Z85C30 SCC is two port, the other two will be the Z180 ports. Looking at the 1488/1489 that looks like RS232 to me (and now I've found the manual that confirms it)

Seems to be a space to add an RTC (crystal, chips, battery).

Doesn't look like there is enough RAM to run CP/M (32K isn't going to cut it) but from the extra pins I imagine you can stick a 128K RAM in there.

You'd also need to populate J7 to attach some kind of disk or other storage to it. There's enough info in the user manual for that as there is a schematic of one of the I/O expansion options which in turn gives you the info needed.

http://www.aa-kkemail.co.uk/kk-files/ppcman.pdf

Incredibly you can still buy them new ... for £450 each cased!

Alan

[Richard Lewis]

The board looks to be about 25 years old. Probably wouldn't hurt the replace electrolytic caps before powering it on. 

[David Richards]

Hi Fredrick, Alan.

I saw the brochure and manual but had thought the later device (V1.7) was quite different from my V1.6 as it has some larger scale ics but I now see it does have what looks like a Z180 too.

You are right about it not being RS484, I see the transceiver chips are  the usual 1488/9. There is an at28c256 paged eeprom as well as the m5m5256 ram.  

I dont think I'll be buying the development system though perhaps I'll try and run it as it i with logic analyer connected or even disassemble the rom a bit to find the i/o addresses before putting some custom code into it.

David.

[David Richards]

Hi, I got around to trying this yesterday and found it has a Pascal compiler and basic interpreter built in, there is an existing application source code in the flash memory. Everything seems ok connected to a serial terminal. I can write my own application and run them too. Good find, perhaps a binary file could be loaded FORTH perhaps. David.

n.b. Found out what one of the the other empty sockets is for, its for the front panel LEDs and switches. (the other being the unpopulated RTC), I made a panel.

[David Richards]

The LEDs are driven by the Z180 CSIO port. 8 LEDs, one per each bit of the serial output.

The serial data is sent every 50 mS, there is no strobe or framing info available.

The circuit below latches the data into a shift register approx 100uS after the last clock pulse.

The SIgrok trace shows the clock and data fllowed by the latch signal going high.

In this instance two LEDs are lit. I'll need a bigger board to add the decode chips and extra LEDs