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HowTo: 128 chan derivative of Hill's 320 design w/ PCB and Linux driver
( Don Law)
Step 1 : Overview
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| | I started out wanting to control 89 different strings of lights from my computer. I was fortunate enough to find computerchristmas.com and Hill's design for 320 ports on a parallel port.
I didn't need 320 channels, and I wanted to make my master on a 160 mm x 100 mm PCB, which doesn't have enough room for 5 banks of 74LS374 chips. So I decided to go for 128 channels, using only 2 banks from Hill's design.
I used the GEDA system on Linux to enter the schematic for the board. A screenshot of GEDA with part of the schematic is shown on this page. You may have to click on it to enlarge it to readability.
A larger version is on my website. (Firefox scales this down, so you may have to click on it to zoom it to full size. It doesn't show the complete schematic, just about half of it.) There is also a
Postscript image of the complete schematic. If you install GEDA, you can use my schematic files. The datafile for the schematic is
on my website
This howto will cover these steps:
- Overview and schematic
- From schematic to PC layout
- The PCB - population, installation
- A subcontroller
- A linux device driver
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