Tatung Einstein SD Card Interface

EinSDein

Charlie Robson has developed an SD card interface board that is designed to work with a range of Z80 based computers, including the Einstein TC02. You can read about its development on Charlie's blog.

Charlie has called the Einstein version EinSDein - a clever combination of Einstein and SD.

Hardware

The heart of the system is a small PCB which holds a CPLD and the SD card slot. (Photos from Charlie's blog)
The SD-X board is connected to the Einstein "Pipe" interface connector - a 60 pin IDC socket on the rear of the computer case. SD-X requires needs a small adapter board to convert the SD-X connector to an IDC plug for connection to the "Pipe" IDC socket.
As you can see, the adapter board and pair of IDC cables dwarf the SD-X PCB.

Firmware

The EinSDein upgrade kit includes a ROM to be installed in the expansion ROM slot on the TC01 computer board. To allow EinSDein to co-exist with 1 or 2 floppy drives, the ROM enables two virtual drives, "2:" and "3:" and allows the system to be booted from the SD card.

The firmware presents the virtual drives are normal Tatung removable disks, but also allows the system to load disk images from the SD card.

To be continued . . . .