The other thing that's been taking my time (besides springtime small engine maintenance and repair at the cabin - all simple stuff) has been the dread, and now deceased keyboard my mother had dropped on me. The synth chip itself is shot, shorting the data lines to ground. That was a long debug, much longer than the device deserved. My buddy found a keyboard for my mother last weekend, in the trash in his lane. Cleaned it up, and it's the descendent model of the same low-end Yamaha PSR-70, but from the early '90s instead.
But that has led to a bit of (VERY OFF-TOPIC) retrocomputing effort in which I'm putting together a little multi-board Z80 computer to mess around with. The idea is to have a main board with the CPU and clock circuitry and then daughter boards for devices, memory, ROM, etc. The mainboard design and a "debug" ROM emulator are designed and ready to go for fabrication. I have two more small boards I want to add to the order, maybe later this week.
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These are 10x20cm and 10x10cm. Pricing on PCBs is *insane*. I costed these PCBs and they come out to 40 cents per 100 square cm. It's a minimum order of 5 boards each, at a quoted price of $6.00 CAD. Yes. $6.00. Plus $24 Fedex. It's a two to three day turn in the factory, then two days for Fedex to get them to me. This is completely ridiculous.
The components remain more expensive, of course, with the card-dege connectors (gray in the first picture) coming in at $4.65 each. Everthing else costs less except for a couple of EEPROMs that run into the $20 range.
This is much cheaper than end mills.
So yeah, retirement: you can take the man out of the computer company, but you can't take the computers out of the man.
Paul
