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BlueSCSI Brackets and Mac Portable Hybrid News

For those of you with things like the Mac TV, LC 550, and similar edge-connector-style machines, there is an update. I have designed a style of bracket for the F4Lite THT V1.1 BlueSCSI that ought to be compatible, but I need a few testers to verify first. If interested, please contact me using the email on the About page.

On the Mac Portable Hybrid project, things are in motion to start making replacements in larger quantities. I am waiting for a dedicated tester board to be manufactured and delivered which will allow me to test every board before shipping.

Also on the Hybrid Recreation front, I am going to be creating some documentation on things to check before ordering. A ‘system pre-check’ if you will. The hybrid does depend on your Portable’s motherboard being in good shape, and these checks will try to assert that your system is not damaged.

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Project Updates

BlueSCSI: New revisions of PCBs are in progress, to improve compatibility with LC systems that require a drive sled plus edge connector adapter like the Mac TV. Also updating to allow for more SMD part variety which will help with the parts shortages that keep popping up.

Macintosh Portable Hybrid Module Recreation: This project is waiting for results from testers, but considered ‘done’ otherwise. See the thread on TinkerDifferent here.

Backlit Macintosh Portable Display Flex Cables: The second round of cables has arrived, and are easier to solder than the first round. Thread on TinkerDifferent.

Newton eMate Display Cables: The replacement screen cable has been tested by me and is waiting for one other tester to get back to me before becoming generally available. Thread on TinkerDifferent.

Newton eMate DRAM Upgrade: After a very long hiatus, I have tested a new set of designs and they seem to work ok. On the way to some testers for verification. Thread on TinkerDifferent.

Original LC Series Replacement Power Supply: This project hasn’t gone anywhere since the last update. But I have parts to make a few of each style. Will update once a decision is made.

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Many Project Updates

It’s been too long since posting here, sorry about that. Many updates are posted to the Tinker Different forum.

BlueSCSI: The F4 XCVR and F4Lite XCVR products are now available. These are intended for use with systems such as Sun, SGI, and others which are natively SCSI2 and often do not work with the original BlueSCSI or my F4 BlueSCSI fork.

I will also work on a mounting bracket which enables XCVR model use with systems such as the Macintosh TV and others that use an edge connector with sliding bracket. The measurements have to be very precise and I don’t have one of these machines, so it’ll be a back and forth with someone that does.

Macintosh Portable Hybrid Recreation: This project is about 80% done. A new revision PCB is on the way which should fix a few issues, and it’s basically time to test this in a real Portable to see what happens. The last challenge is a signal called the “A/D line”. This reports battery level information to the Power Manager chip, and is an incredibly sensitive circuit. If it continues to fight and cause problems, I may replace the A/D circuit with a simpler and less fiddly design. This simpler design won’t be as accurate, but it will allow the Portable to function on both battery and while plugged in.

Backlit Macintosh Portable Display Flex Cables: A new round of these cables has arrived, which needs to be quickly tested and then I’ll put up a listing on this site. Note that I don’t have any of the connectors, and those would need to be moved over from your original cable. I will offer a connector transplant service, which involves sending in the original cable and a small charge for actually performing the operation.

Newton eMate Display Cables: Continuing my trend of recreating flex cables, a design for the eMate has been produced and is in testing. I came across a large set of eMates and will be refurbishing them for sale.

Newton eMate DRAM Upgrade: After the unfortunate failure of my eMate DRAM + Flash project, I pivoted and redesigned for DRAM only. These have a much higher success rate, and will be listed on this site at some point.

Original LC Series Replacement Power Supply: These are power supplies for the LC, LC II, and LC III. This project has stalled for a variety of reasons, from cost to opinions on whether there should be an external power brick or not. I have two designs, one which puts everything internally and another which uses an external power brick. The internal design would cost more, and the design using an external power brick would cost a little bit less. Unsure on the direction to go for the future of the project.

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Backlit Macintosh Portable Screen Cable and Product Stock Update

You may recall from awhile back that I have been working on a new screen flex-cable for the backlit macintosh portable. These cable are cracking, delaminating, and reaching the end of their usable lifespan.

Fortunately, my latest cable design works just fine – has been tested in two backlit portables so far. The design needs some basic tweaking to make assembly easier for future orders, and it needs to be wrapped in packing tape to increase durability. But other than that, they work!

The design changes will be made whenever I have time to get back to it.

https://tinkerdifferent.com/threads/recreating-backlit-macintosh-portable-display-flex-cables.567/

Now, the product stock update. I’ve had very little time the last few weeks to work on kits and assembled products. But this upcoming week I will be building as many kits and assembled as possible, and will be working on the main F4_BlueSCSI GitHub repo to improve documentation and make hardware designs more available. So bear with me as I work through the process.

I’m becoming more aware of interest in my Newton / eMate products / projects too, so that’s on the roadmap to get moving again. Trying to do all of this as a solo operation means things will regularly get dropped because I lack the time to do it all.

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New BlueSCSI design incoming – now with transceivers!

I have been experimenting and prototyping with this hardware for months – since late 2021.

I have gone through three hardware revisions.

And now, it’s time to reveal the latest and greatest BlueSCSI so far.

Behold, BlueSCSI with bus transceivers for increased compatibility.

F4 XCVR Desktop Version 1

It looks a little odd, but with the right bracket design it should be compatible with Macs that require a card-edge connector for hard drives.

Currently being benchmarked, with a production run in progress. Available late March.

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Macintosh Portable Projects Progress

  • Backlit Macintosh Portable Screen Cable Recreation:
    Prototype cables have completed production and are on the way to me now. They should arrive by the end of the week. I don’t own a backlit Portable, and will be sending two cables out to testers once they arrive. Presuming they work, I’ll place a larger order for them and will start selling them here.

    Pricing is likely to fall around $40 to $45 per cable for the raw flex only. You will need to move your connector from the original cable to the new, because I couldn’t find connectors available which are the same. If you want me to move the connector for you, that’ll cost a bit more and require sending in your cable. My fancy desoldering setup makes moving the connector pretty fast.
  • Non-Backlit Macintosh Portable Hybrid Module Recreation:
    This is a recreation of the original Hybrid module, using new old stock parts. The first round of PCBs are for prototyping only, and are pretty ugly. I created a ‘downstream’ board which mimics the components in a real Portable so there’s no fear of blowing things up as I tweak high-precision resistor values.

    Looks aside, these recreations are working quite well and only a few things remain to be worked out.
    Things which work: Main 5v power rail, 12v enable, -5 enable, battery charger, battery charge indicator signal (to the power manager chip), battery charge cutoff (HICHG)
    Things which still need work and testing: -5v power rail itself (-6 for some reason), under-voltage lockout, A/D feedback line voltage, and testing in a real portable for functionality

    Picture of the setup for fun (like I said, not exactly pretty):
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Inventory

Due to bad timing on my orders for parts and materials, at least some of the products in my store are going to be running out of stock soon. Orders are in progress for more PCBs and parts, sorry about any lapses. Being a one-person business makes it hard to keep on top of everything all the time.

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Wow

My store was moved to the top of scsi.blue recently because Tom and Eric were out of stock, and wow. I had no idea there would be so much demand. I’m out of stock of just about everything, and more PCBs are in the mail.

Note that the F4 (black PCBs) and F4Lite (green PCBs) branches are faster than stock (blue PCB) bluescsi on 68030 machines and newer, I hope you enjoy the extra speed.

Next week I will be able to restock:
* Mainline / F1 desktop
* F4Lite desktop
* F4Lite PowerBook (PowerBook V4 is practically discontinued, they take a long time to assemble – and F4Lite is faster)
* F4Lite DB25 external
* F4Lite Centronics 50 pin (new product, low quantity will be available until more connectors come in)

Other projects which will be in progress soon:
* Macintosh Backlit Portable screen flex cable replacements
** Currently this is waiting on a hard-PCB to check the through-hole connector footprint
** After verifying the connector footprint, there will be some final checks to do on the design and then I’ll do a prototype run of the actual flex cables. See this thread on Tinker Different if you want to indicate interest in buying a recreation cable: https://tinkerdifferent.com/threads/recreating-backlit-macintosh-portable-display-flex-cables.567/


* Macintosh Portable (non-backlit) hybrid module recreation with NOS (new old stock) parts
** Found new old stock op-amps, designed a ‘downstream’ tester board for the hybrid
** Very curious to see if this works, because it could revive a lot of portables which are sitting around doing nothing right now
** Also of note: C25 and C26 on the mac portable should not be replaced with ceramic MLCCs! MLCCs are not stable enough in capacitance rating across voltage ranges, so these should be tantalum or electrolytic. Learned this after reverse engineering the hybrid schematic.

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PowerBook BlueSCSI F4Lite Available now

There’s a new product in the shop, PowerBook BlueSCSI version F4Lite. This is my forked version of BlueSCSI, all-green, running on a newer microcontroller module, which is faster than the original all-blue version.

Both kits and fully assembled are available, a first for my PowerBook designs. This is mostly through-hole with the important note that the SCSI connector goes on the *bottom* of the PCB! Kit assembly page is coming soon, so wait for that if you don’t want to refer to the product pictures alone.

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New Products On The Way

On the BlueSCSI front, there are new through-hole designs on the way from the PCB manufacturer, for desktop and powerbook. These have already been verified functional, and these PCBs are for production. They are easier to assemble, with only a few surface mount parts : the microSD slot, and large SMD capacitors.

A new BlueSCSI product line, ‘F4 Lite’, will make its appearance with green PCBs. This style is just as fast as full F4 with the current SCSI protocol implementation, despite being more affordable. Future improvements to the SCSI protocol will make full F4 likely faster. But for now it’s a cheaper solution that runs at the same speed.

Also for the first time, F4 will be available for powerbooks. These designs are through-hole too, and allow disabling termination (by removing active terminator packs) for those that want to try systems other than powerbooks where termination must be fully off.

The eMate 300 RAM/Flash upgrade module will start production when the PCBs arrive.
— Update on the eMate module: either my PCBs are really fiddly or the flash chips I have are all bad. These don’t really seem to want to work, and the PCB design will be updated again later to see if things can be worked out.

The LC MACAA Power Supply Replacement has had one more PCB tweak and is not the easiest to assemble, but will be a good solution for those who want a new power supply for their LC, LC II, LC III, and LC 475.
— Update on MACAA: For the LC there’s actually a nice little medical power supply that does +12, +5, and -5 just like the LC needs. Will be easier and cheaper to just use that instead, and work is being retargeted to that.

The ribbon cable for macintosh portable backlit display upgrade is in production, with one tester ready and waiting to give it a shot.

Another new product (later in the future, design in progress) will be the standard backlit mac portable ribbon cable, as this is a different design – but they tear just as often.

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eMate 300 RAM/Flash Upgrade Success

The eMate 300 RAM/Flash upgrade board (a redesign of the original, using different RAM chips) has passed initial testing. eMate powers on, reports the increased System Memory, and increased Storage. Now I need to do some more testing to verify that things are ok – installing programs, and so on.

The planned pricing for this module is $55, and I expect to produce at least 10.

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Updates on THT BlueSCSI, eMate, and Portable

Non-clone “blue pill” modules are becoming increasingly expensive – would you believe that they actually cost *more* than the faster and newer module for F4 BlueSCSI? This chip shortage is weird, some things are crazy expensive and other newer things haven’t changed much in pricing.

Both through-hole styles of BlueSCSI (mainline and F4) have passed testing successfully. They use only a few surface mount components: The microSD slot and capacitors for the active terminator (large capacitors which ought to be easy to hand solder with a set of tweezers). After a mounting bracket is designed, the mainline bluescsi design will be released on GitHub.

The eMate RAM/Flash expansion is proving to be somewhat tricky. The DRAM side of it (system memory as the Memory Info pane calls it) seems to be working. But the Flash (storage) side is not recognized. I’ve ordered another prototype PCB and set of flash chips for testing.

The Mac Portable project has made a little progress. It looks like the connector footprints are correct, so it’s really a matter of trying a production run to see if they work. This is the recreation of the flex cable for the official backlit screen upgrade for the original mac portable. Pretty tiny target audience, but useful nonetheless.

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Several Projects In Progress

The LC MACAA prototype last mentioned a month ago has required a few more rounds of updates to more thoroughly engineer for the possibility of power supply or regulator chip failure. Latest prototype PCBs are here, and need assembly / testing as usual. A 3D-printed mounting bracket has been designed, and will be improved upon prior to release (it’s kind of ugly).

A new project in the list is a replacement for the eMate 300 RAM and Flash expansion card. These cards are rare and expensive, but only use three reasonably affordable chips – and that makes them the perfect target for reverse engineering. Prototypes are in motion for the original 1 megabyte style plus an upgraded 4 megabyte version. Want your eMate to have as much RAM as a 2100? That’s the goal here. 🙂

I’ve also taken on a reverse engineering task, to redesign the flex cable for a backlit screen upgrade for the Macintosh Portable. That has been designed and I’m looking around for the right connectors now.

All of this while still working on BlueSCSI! The new PowerBook version 4 is up for sale, and it’s 100% surface mount in order to bring the edge connector closer to where you’d find it on an original hard drive. An F4 variant of the PowerBook design is also in progress. And through-hole style mainline BlueSCSI and F4 BlueSCSI prototypes are on the way from the PCB manufacturer (with active termination, of course). Lots going on here.

How many projects do I have in motion? All of them, of course. 🙂

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Tech by Androda, LLC

This site will chronicle my adventures with vintage computers and hardware, electronics in general, and any software which appears along the way. I want to create solutions for vintage computers which don’t require large amounts of configuration or tinkering to make them work.

See the Shop section for:
* Various styles of BlueSCSI™ V2, including Desktop, PowerBook, DB25, and Centronics 50 pin
* The HIDHopper™ Adapter Series, for converting modern USB keyboards and mice to vintage standards
* Newton and eMate Products
* New Old Stock Networking Hardware and Adapters
* A wide variety of products for the Macintosh Portable
* Recreated parts for vintage systems

Ping me with questions at the contact email listed on the About Page.

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LC MACAA Prototype Success

Prototype PCB for the LC MACAA worked without a hitch. The board was just a little too large, so I’ve shaved it down and ordered a second revision. Also found a compatible power supply connector housing and pins.

The LC MACAA can be a complete drop-in replacement for your original LC power supply, with no soldering necessary (unless you feel like it). Next is the 3d printed mounting bracket and final wiring setup. LCs need 12v, 5v, and -5v. The MACAA board provides 5v and -5v from 12v – you can use either an external 12v power brick or the Mean Well supply that I found fits perfectly into the original width.

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New Project Series: MACAA

F4 BlueSCSI is now finished and up for sale in the shop. It’s faster than the original BlueSCSI, but more expensive because the “Black Pill” modules cost more.

My next target are the power supplies in your old Macs. They’re getting old, and in some cases replacing the capacitors isn’t enough to fix them. Thus, new supplies are needed.

Enter the MACAA (MACintosh Atx Alternative) – a project to recreate power supplies for these old Macs using all-new components. Note that this is the ATX Alternative and won’t focus on using ATX or PicoPSU supplies unless that makes the job a lot simpler.

First target is the Macintosh LC Series. LC, LC II, LC III, Quadra 605, LC / Performa 475, and all the other LC clones which use the same supply. PCB design for the MACAA prototype is done, and an order will be placed soon.

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New Hardware Support For BlueSCSI™

For the last few weeks I’ve been working on porting the BlueSCSI software to the “black pill” F401/F411. Getting close to something usable now (it boots), and it comes with a speed increase.

“Blue pills” will run at about 900k read, 650k write. The black pills run at about 1100k read and 800k write. So, not a huge speed increase but it’s something.

Will be getting some prototype PCBs made for testing in desktops and powerbooks to see if compatibility is different. The higher clock speed and faster response times of the black pills probably mean that timings on the bus have changed, and I don’t really know how well the software complies with standards anyway.

My next targets are probably the STM32L412 and STM32G431, as these are pretty low cost and could be integrated into the board (no more ‘pill module’ required).

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Newton Serial Board Works!

Basically the only thing left to do is find the correct mounting screw, one which is as thin as possible (and might require a countersink on the board itself to fit properly). Mounting screw in the upper right corner is hard to line up because if the internal expansion slot connector isn’t perfectly aligned then the error is multiplied across the distance and that hole just won’t line up.

Additions since the last prototype run:

  • Switch for either forcing the chip on or listening to the chip enable pin
  • Additional footprint type for the chip in case you can’t find the CG variant of LTC1323 chip
How it looks installed
You really have to trim down the port to fit properly
Back of Newton doesn’t appear to flex very much
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Newton Serial Boards on the way

My next (hopefully final) iteration of the newton 2×00 serial board is on the way from the PCB manufacturer now. Moved some things around so two different chip types can be used (in case you find the one or the other) and added a switch to override Newton control of the serial transceiver.

This way you can turn it on, install the control software, and then flip the switch the other way to let the Newton control it. Should hopefully not affect battery life too much.

Need to order the switches and some more serial ports. Unfortunately I haven’t found a source for surface-mount circular serial ports so that means I get to have the fun of snipping the leads down to less than 0.6mm (PCB thickness) to avoid bending the case of the Newton.