What do you do when you can no longer get that PCB you desperately need? You make one! Thanks to https://www.pcbway.com for sponsoring this video, and also for providing the PCBs free of charge.
The 6530 RRIOT chip is used in all the Commodore IEEE disk drives. And if it dies, it’s impossible to find a replacement. EXCEPT, with an adapter we can use a much more common 6532 in its place. Today we will make that adapter, using our own PCB design.
This project is based on the original work of Ruud Baltissen, who came up with the schematic. The project page on his site is: http://www.baltissen.org/newhtm/6530repl.htm (btw, if you just go to baltissen.org, his home page has a cool loading screen!) Ruud’s page has complete details of the project, including the schematic and how it works.. There is an Eagle cad file to download, but I couldn’t to get it to open. So I decided to make my own. I mean, how hard can it be?
So I used the free PCB design package, KiCad – https://www.kicad.org with the Freerouting add-on https://freerouting.org. After recreating the schematic, laying out the board was pretty straightforward.
The final step is to create a Gerber file that can be uploaded to PCB Way. At this point, you need to know three things: The dimensions of your board, how many you want, and what colour you want them to be (this is by far the hardest choice!). You can see from the thumbnail that I went for purple! When you click Submit, the board goes off to be checked by their technicians, and once it’s checked you can place the order and wait for the boards to arrive.
And then the fun really starts…