Hans Franke has announced the BastelCard, a prototyping board for people that want to design and build their own cards for Apple II computers. The BastelCard lets you create your own circuits, but is also available with on-board support logic and flash storage for ROM-resident driver software. The BastelCard is due in mid-August, starting at around $65.The card’s specifications include:
- High quality, industry-standard manufacturing — gold plated slot contacts, high quality silk-screening.
- Flash storage (1 MB of non-volatile storage, 256 blocks with 256 bytes each at /IOSEL).
- Configuration functions (enable/disable flash, enable/disable configuration block, enable/disable where-I’m-stuck, status LEDs).
- Support logic (chip select decoding, IRQ daisy chain, where-I’m-stuck logic).
- Daughterboard (add-on modules, buffer logic).
- Support software.
- Huge prototype area.
- Sample designs included (adding a ROM disk, user RAM, floating-point co-processor, ethernet module).
All schematics and source code are included.
There will be three versions of the card:
- Bare board with no flash.
- 1 MB of flash.
- High-quality PC104 connectors.
Due to the high quality of the design, it could even be used for small production run designs.