ABug North 18/19/20 November 2016, Bolton

[jgharston]

That's an interesting regulation.
Out of interest which edition of BS7671 are you referring to?

The Green Regs. 16th Edition Second Edition (voltage and colour harmonisation)

The problem with that old regulation is that a user can replace the fuse / cartridge with a higher value.

Not if the installation has a proper fuseboard where it's impossible to insert a lower rated fuse holder. As opposed to the modern cheap-tack MCB/RCD things

I may have a chat with an NICEIC inspector to find out the history behind it's omission from the current regulations.

It makes a lot of installations non-compliant if they were new, particularly 16mm supply tails which I find in practially every house built before about 1980.

[Jeremy Grayson]

Very belated thanks to everyone who made me feel most welcome at ABug last Sunday. My repartee doesn't extend very much beyond talking about games, alas, but even managing to get the words out without panicking and running off would have been unthinkable about three years ago.

I hope those who bought things are happy with their purchases. I was particularly glad to be able to find good homes for all of my stash of printer paper!

I've certainly got a good idea of what I want to have in place the next time I do one of these - the same Beeb, but with the ZipStix actually plugged in from the get-go rather than forgotten about in a crate until an hour before hometime Might bring the Master and/or an Elk also.

Winter and spring weekends are mostly taken up with freelance work commitments, but the Sunday of the Leicester event coincides with a rare-ish free day - I'm going to ask to be added to the waiting list for that.

Thanks again,

Jeremy

gc

[IanS]

If anyone I bored at Bolton with pictures of the Atom Econet PCB I'd had made at OSH Park was interested in how they turned out, they arrived in the post today.

It works

If I did it again, I'd change a few things, but it didn't require any bodge wires, so I'm happy.

[Multiwizard]

If anyone I bored at Bolton with pictures of the Atom Econet PCB I'd had made at OSH Park was interested in how they turned out, they arrived in the post today.

It works

If I did it again, I'd change a few things, but it didn't require any bodge wires, so I'm happy.
IMG_20161130_203138584_HDR.jpg
IMG_20161130_203011131.jpg
IMG_20161130_202958877.jpg

Oh very nice...


Greetings, Wim...

[sPhilMainwaring]

Hi Ian

The Acorn Econet board looks awesome ... brings back memories

Did you have to make the ROM yourself?

What * commands does the Atom ROM support and does it get other * commands it doesn't recognise from a fileserver?

Cheers

Phil M

[jgharston]

It will be the standard Atom Econet ROM. The only commands it implements are *I AM, everything else is handled by the server. A couple of meetings ago we had to do some step-by-step testing to work out what to add to SoftMDFS to allow the Atom access. Even *LOAD/*SAVE is passed to the server for parsing.

[oss003]

Nice work Ian, great job

Is this the improved version of the earlier board you had?

Greetings
Kees

[IanS]

Yes, it's just a PCB of the earlier Vero version. (74ls245 changed for a 244, the 245 made the vero layout easier)

It is just the original Atom Econet Rom.

Phil, One of the boards is earmarked for you, I offered to make you one, when you expressed an interest at an earlier Abug meeting.

[Prime]

Yes, it's just a PCB of the earlier Vero version. (74ls245 changed for a 244, the 245 made the vero layout easier)

I'm supprised you swapped it the 245 would have made the design of the pcb easier as well. Or was it a cost thing? Interesingly enough there are versions of the 244 with the inputs & outputs on opposite sides the 74xx544, likewise the 573 and 574 are versions of the 373 and 374 with inputs one side, outputs the other.

Neat board tho, at least it's more perminent than your vero board one, though even that has lasted 7 years

Cheers

Phill.

[sPhilMainwaring]

Thanks Ian

I can bring my Atom along to the next meet or I can PayPal you some spons

Cheers

I might have to invest in a colour board and AtomMMC now

Can they live in harmony or are they incompatible?

[IanS]

Yes, it's just a PCB of the earlier Vero version. (74ls245 changed for a 244, the 245 made the vero layout easier)

I'm supprised you swapped it the 245 would have made the design of the pcb easier as well. Or was it a cost thing? Interesingly enough there are versions of the 244 with the inputs & outputs on opposite sides the 74xx544, likewise the 573 and 574 are versions of the 373 and 374 with inputs one side, outputs the other.

It doesn't need a bi-directional buffer, and the extra "wiring" on the PCB is effectively free (appart from my time drawing the traces).
The original Acorn card had an 81LS95, I wasn't going to put one of those on. A 244 seemed the closest equivalent.
I really wish I'd made the board a bit bigger and put a 5-pin DIN socket on the board, maybe I'll do that for version 2.

[IanS]

Thanks Ian

I can bring my Atom along to the next meet or I can PayPal you some spons

Cheers

I might have to invest in a colour board and AtomMMC now

Can they live in harmony or are they incompatible?

Unless you are in a rush, It's probably best done at the next meet. We can then ensure it all works. (I tried it on my spare Atom and it didn't work. It had a broken track from the 6502 IRQ line to the rest of the main board.)

The Atom doesn't really have the sophistication of the beeb for multiple filing systems, so Econet and MMC don't get along (they also use the same rom space). With Phill's ROMRAM you can swap between them relatively easily.

[jgharston]

I've tracked down the bug in SoftMDFS (and it will also be in awServer) that stopped us backing up Dave's SCSI hard drive. When copying files larger than available memory a Create is done (a Save with no data transfer) to reserve disk space before the copy starts, and the Create function was losing the URD reference, so bombing out with a 'Channel not open' error - which lead down a dead end looking through the PutBytes code instead of the Create code. I've just run a test and copied a couple of meg from my ADFS CF drive to the SoftMDFS with no problems.

I've also made a tweek so that if you log on from an Atom all text messages are in upper case.

[BeebMaster]

That's good to know. I still haven't tried SoftMDFS, it hasn't even made it on to the to-do list yet.

I think I need a to-do-list-to-do-list !!

[IanS]

If anyone I bored at Bolton with pictures of the Atom Econet PCB I'd had made at OSH Park was interested in how they turned out, they arrived in the post today.

It works

If I did it again, I'd change a few things, but it didn't require any bodge wires, so I'm happy.
IMG_20161130_203138584_HDR.jpg
IMG_20161130_203011131.jpg
IMG_20161130_202958877.jpg

So the lack of 5-pin Din socket was annoying, so I did a V2.

The Econet module plugs in underneath.

(Guess who was trying to get it 5cmx5cm or smaller to fit in the lowest price dirtypcb tariff)
I'll stop now.

[BeebMaster]

That's good to know. I still haven't tried SoftMDFS, it hasn't even made it on to the to-do list yet.

I think I need a to-do-list-to-do-list !!

I tried it today on the RISC PC but I can't get it work. It loads and seems to read the standard Exports file but any attempt to access it from another station causes the RISC PC to freeze up permanently. Is there something I've missed?

[jgharston]

That's good to know. I still haven't tried SoftMDFS, it hasn't even made it on to the to-do list yet.
I think I need a to-do-list-to-do-list !!

I tried it today on the RISC PC but I can't get it work. It loads and seems to read the standard Exports file but any attempt to access it from another station causes the RISC PC to freeze up permanently. Is there something I've missed?

We discovered a bug today where if you attempt to log on with an unknown user, or with a wrong password, it hangs. I won't be able to rebuild the zip file until I get home, but this is the updated !RunImage.

[BeebMaster]

Thank you, working now and very nice it is too.

(The !Runimage needs to be stamped as BASIC file, it came out as Data.)

Actually the previous version crashed the RISC PC on any kind of access, even doing *. before logging on (which is my invariable practice when I do log on), but the new one works fine.

[jgharston]

Actually the previous version crashed the RISC PC on any kind of access, even doing *. before logging on (which is my invariable practice when I do log on), but the new one works fine.

I added a specific "check for *CAT when not logged on" check as that is the most common thing to do before logging on.

There a still a few bugs that we've uncovered today, mainly involving read/writing very large files with GBPB. I had to do the semi-dead hard drive recovery with my ARM CoPro so I could transfer 320K chunks with *LOAD/*SAVE as OSGBPB'ing more than 20K was causing problems.

There's a 'bugs' file in the archive which has some notes on bugs that have been uncovered and not yet fixed.

[jgharston]

There's a 'bugs' file in the archive which has some notes on bugs that have been uncovered and not yet fixed.

I spent last night digging through SoftMDFS to track down a couple of stubborn bugs and think I've squashed them.
Version 0.05 has fixed:
* Accessing directories via root without explicit '$' reference works, eg :A5000.Apps correctly maps to :A5000.$.Apps
* Allows OPEN of image files, so allows copying of, eg, ZIP archives, etc.
* Saving very large files (eg >64K from ARM CoPro) used to repeat first 20K, seems to have been fixed. Test saves of 64K/128K of data from ARM works.
* LOAD-as-command from %.
* OSGBPB used to fail if using existing PTR, first block was repeated. Now works.
* I AM pings client before checking user/pass/etc. so logon errors to Atom client correctly cased.
* INFO returns upper case string to Atom client.
* Create works - URD was being overwritten.

The large-saves and OSGBPB errors were what was causing problems doing the backups at Leicester in January.