[vcf-midatlantic] Altair 680 Prototype Boards

[Systems Glitch]

All,

I've been working with some of the people on the Altair Club listserv on a prodution Altair 680 RAM board. Phase one in that process has been to build a prototyping board -- the 680 uses the same physical connector as S-100, but the board is a different shape, and the bus is electrically different. Just sent the following design to be fabricated:

http://imgur.com/JD9JGQv

Bunch of largeish plated through holes, just like the Apple 2 protoboard -- I size the holes so that you can stuff a 2 Watt carbon comp resistor in there with no drilling, which also makes it easy to stick multiple wires in when doing a point-to-point soldered prototype. There's a regulator area in the top corner since it looks like you shouldn't draw much power from the regulated +5V rails on the bus. I used a large axial electrolytic for a main filter capacitor (bottom left of board) since that's what the original MITS 16K RAM board does -- presumably, like other MITS power supplies, this one is also lacking somewhat in primary filter capacitance.

I'll send out a preorder for the finished version, which will have proper hard gold plated edge connector fingers, once I've gotten the design verified.

Thanks,
Jonathan