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  • Several Regions have held meetups already, but others are being planned or are evaluating the interest. The Ontario GTA West area meetup is planned for Saturday April 26th at Greasemonkeys shop in Aylmer Ontario. If you are interested and haven’t signed up yet, click here! Arbutus has also explored interest in a Fraser Valley meetup but it seems members either missed his thread or had other plans. Let him know if you are interested in a meetup later in the year by posting here! Slowpoke is trying to pull together an Ottawa area meetup later this summer. No date has been selected yet, so let him know if you are interested here! We are not aware of any other meetups being planned this year. If you are interested in doing something in your area, let everyone know and make it happen! Meetups are a great way to make new machining friends and get hands on help in your area. Don’t be shy, sign up and come, or plan your own meetup!

Arduino Mega

I used my EPROM Eraser last spring. I actually have two.
EPROM_ERASERS.webp

So what did I use it for?
This machine.
ERG-68K_InsideCleaned.jpg

Which had in a separate cabinet:
ERG-DiskCabinet.jpg

The hard drive was in really bad shape. Bearing grease hard and it had a lot of trouble coming up to speed and maintaining speed. I was able to make a copy of most of it onto this:
MFM_Frontside.jpg

Which a carrier board for a BeagleBone Black running LinuxCNC and the hardware emulates an old style MFM hard disk drive. The Blue Super Caps keep the system running long enough so if power is switched off the Beagle has time to save files and do a clean shutdown.
MFM_Backside.jpg


So where did I use the EPROM Programmer? The M68000 CPU board. Based on the information on the recovered hard drive the EPROM monitor only every booted from the floppy disk. And there were no bootable floppy disks.

To make a long story (very long), I used other systems to create a bootable floppy to be able to get the system booted to recognize the hard drive. Ultimately I rewrote (68K assembler) the monitor to boot off either the floppy or the MFM ST506 hard drive (the BBB emulated one).

ERG68K-CPU-1.jpg


I had to use a WIN-XP system to run the EPROM programmer which used files generated by an OS9-68K simulator running on the WIN-7 system. Then the EPROMs (one even, one odd) went into the CPU and I'd work on booting the OS9-68K mainframe.

And I wonder why sometimes work on/in the machine shop isn't done...
 
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