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Micro-Professor MPF-1
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SB-Bus Driver II

This SB-Bus Driver has 8 outputs so it can drive up to 80 SB-Bus devices. It has some intelligence to display the last selected SB-Bus address. It can also serve 2 master computers. The one that calls first rules over the SB-Bus until the bus is released again. The SB-Bus Driver II is build around a Zilog Z8 processor.
Project status: Finished project. Not ready for the world yet.

AT89C4051 Emulator

Emulates an Atmel AT89C4051 (or it's little sisters). Together with the Tiny Eprom Simulator you can write programs for the AT89C4051 with the same ease as writing programs for processors with external ROM's.
Project status: Planned project.

Eprom Simulator

This is the bigger brother of the Tiny Eprom Simulator. But it is also a lot more difficult to build. It has a maximum of 256kb RAM. The EPROM sizes it can simulate range from 1kb to 256kb. The operation however is quite similar to the operation of the Tiny Eprom Simulator. This device is built around a Zilog Z8 processor and is also controlled by the SB-Bus.
Project status: Finished project. Not ready for the world yet.

Eprom Programmer

The Eprom Programmer is also a member of the SB-Bus family. Once you've finished your project with the aid of the (Tiny) Eprom Simulator, you only have to change the SB-Bus address to send the ROM file to the Eprom Programmer instead of the Simulator.
The Eprom Programmer can program most of the popular 8 bit EPROM's. It can also program a few less known devices, like TI's 2532. Further more it can read many ROM types, so you can make a copy of it to a normal EPROM. And finally you can program battery backed up RAM to emulate EPROM's during development time.
The heart of the Eprom Programmer is an Intel 8085 processor.
Project status: Finished project. Not ready for the world yet.

Digital Power Supply

This project may be very interesting for many others. The idea is to create a universal power supply controller board. Such a controller board will provide many professional features for a standard laboratory power supply.
I will name only a few features:

  • The output voltage and current can be set with one or two digital pot meters. This introduces many interesting advantages.
  • No more noisy pot meters!
  • Output values are digital and therefore will never drift.
  • Can be controlled with only one regulator in case you have only limited front panel space (it is very hard to set voltage and current with only one analogue pot meter).
  • Step size is proportional to turning speed. Turn fast for course changes, turn slowly for precise adjustments. This is far easier than with multi turn pots or course and fine tune pots.
  • Introducing pre-set memories is much easier, because digital pot meters don't have an absolute position.
  • Current setting can be done without shorting the output to see what the pre-set value is.
  • A maximum output value can be set to prevent dangerous values on the outputs of the power supply.
  • The temperature of the heat sink and power transformer can be monitored continuously. In case of over temperature a fan can be switched on to cool the output transistors. And if the temperature rises above a critical level the power supply can be switched off before accidents will happen.
  • It is very easy to add a range switching relay with a nice switching hysteresis to reduce power dissipation.

The universal power supply controller can be equipped with 1 or 2 digital panel meters and/or 1 or 2 analogue panel meters. The properties of the power supply like maximum output voltage, maximum output current, range switch threshold and calibration data can be preset in internal EEPROM memory. The gain of the output DACs can be set by a few resistors, to allow maximum resolution. Resolution can be 10 or 12 bits, depending on the DACs used. And above all the power supply will be controllable through the SB-Bus.
Adding a micro processor to the power supply design is only a very small price to pay for all these added features, don't you think.
Project status: Under development.

That's Not All Folks!

There are many many many more ideas. If I live up to be 150 I may be able to finish all projects that I thought of until now. So please visit my projects pages every now and then to check on new projects, either being finished or in the making.

 

© 2004, San Bergmans, Oisterwijk, The Netherlands
http://www.sbprojects.com