The Second Post of 2015!

We are in the running for "least imaginative post title".
Winter is alternatively freezing us, then dumping more snow on us.  L12 continues to tick right along, running the current version of SPOCS.
Not too much is happening in SPOCS-land right now.  The Sinclair QL is back in one piece, and runs like a top.  Some years ago, I began building a floppy disk interface board for the QL.  The hardware got built, and the firmware was up to the point of reading a directory from a disk.  Well, decades later, the quest to re-build mass storage for the QL has begun.  This time, I will use SD cards for storage.
At this point, the hardware is almost completely designed.  Did you know that SD cards are complex little things?  They use a serial communication method, called SPI.  It's very fast, but a little odd.  (SD cards also support another communications mode, but nobody seems to use it.)
Some folks over in England are building an SD card interface for the QL.  They are using programmable logic for the SPI interface.  I plan to use a microcontroller, mostly because I don't have a means of programming logic chips.  I do, however, have a programmer that will burn PROMS and EPROMS, which I have a bunch of.  We will see what happens.

In the meantime, stay warm and safe.

And, good night, Kate Barrett, wherever you are.