Hello, I have some unibus machines that always need some way to interface to modern disks. I always dream to make an universal board that could act as disk and/or tape interface to a modern medium (scsi or cf/sd card), but also ram, network, I/O, whatever... It would be very nice to design a system based on fpga + cpu (arm), so you can load linux on it and avoid the hassle of handling file systems for the sd card, management and configuration, etc. The low level part, the access to the bus, address decoding, and all the parts that need real time reactions could be handled by the fpga. The good part is that I could really help to design a system like this. The bad is that it is expensive, specially because you have to use bga components that need to be mounted by smd assembling machines. But: there's always the possibility to choose a commercial development board, and mount it as SOM over a larger board that would include only psu and bus level translators. This way could be cheaper and can be mounted by skilled hands... If there's a number of people that would invest some money on it, to repay tooling and minimum lot costs for the pcb and components, we could definitely work together to make it.
Anybody interested? Andrea
