On Fri, 26 Oct 2001, Spiro Trikaliotis wrote:
> I hope you want to connect the DB9 with these ribbon cables you mention here
> (and not mount them directly on the PCB)?
No, the cassette port connector and the DB9 connector are surface mounted
(soldered to pads at the ends of the board) already in the current design.
I'm using the DB9 connector variant that is meant to be soldered to a
cable, not the solder-through variant that is commonly used with circuit
boards.
In addition to the surface mounted cassette port connector and the DB9
connector, there are 11 soldering pads in a row (one is a key) in my
current board design. These pads are for uploading the firmware to the
microcontroller (it's not required for normal use) and for mounting a
Commodore serial bus cable, if someone is going to write firmware in Atmel
AVR assembler that translates the Commodore serial bus to RS-232, and
software in the C programming language that allows a remote computer to
emulate Commodore disk drives and printers via this RS-232 connection.
More than half of the code memory (2 kilobytes) is still available.
So, it's not absolutely necessary to have good quality soldering pads for
these connectors. The serial bus interface could be implemented with a
short length of cable whose one end is directly soldered to pads on the
board. Maybe even solder-through pads if there is enough space.
> I have seen more than one device where the mechanical stress of a connector
> surface-mounted let the connecter remove itself from the PCB! :-((
I don't think that this is a problem with the DB9 and the cassette port
connectors, since the mounting area is pretty large.
Marko
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