41CL chips going EOL - how many 41CL boards are desired in the future ?

[Monte Dalrymple]

(06-14-2017 06:57 PM)sa-penguin Wrote:  Wow, talk about timing. There's a Xilinx new Dev Board coming out, for about $90, called the Mini Zed.

At first I thought: what possible use could this have?
But when compared to the 41CL it has:

• Plenty of Flash RAM,
• USB port (for standard keyboard),
• Arduino connector (for 3.5" LCD display),
• Xilinx FPGA core for import of 41CL VHDL / Verilog...
  

...and suddenly there's a lot of potential.

There'd need to be changes, of course. Going from a scanned keypad to reading values from a USB-connected keyboard isn't exactly trivial.
BUT - I suspect this dev board has enough grunt to do the job.
Power & comms come from other USB ports, hanging off your PC. You could have the "41-CL2" sitting between your conventional keyboard, and your PC, ready to be invoked with a key shortcut.
Minimal loss of desk space.

That's a format which would interest me.

Replacing the keyboard would be the opposite of trivial. But it would be manageable if you merely translated the USB keyboard stuff directly into a open/closed set of signals that tied to the existing keyboard scanner. The Verilog source code for the NEWT is available on the 41CL website, as are the board schematics. I also have a Verilog model of the display driver chips, which would help translating to some other display format. I also have Verilog for the Timer chip.

In the past I have toyed with the idea of a "desktop" 41CL, with nice big LED displays, but never have gotten beyond the "that might be cool" stage.

Monte