HERO 1 MEMCOM BOARD

by Arctec Systems

Aug. 1983

INTRODUCTION

Summary of Features

This peripheral provides the following major improvements to Heathkit’s HERO-1 robot.

 1)  Read/Write Memory (RAM) is expanded to a total of 32K. This may be increased by an additional 2K by replacing the 2K Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory (EPROM) chip, which comes with the board, with another 2K RAM chip.

 2)  An RS232C compatible serial communication port is available with switch selectable, crystal controlled transmission rates ranging from 150 to 19,200 bits per second (bps).

 3)  Serial communications software for uploading and downloading programs to a personal computer is permanently available in an onboard EPROM.

 4)  Two 8-bit bi-directional ports with two handshaking lines on each port is available for driving printers, parallel data transfers, control of other peripherals, etc.

 5)  Two 16-bit interval timers are available for counting, timing, etc.

 6)     A greatly expanded prototyping area is available with all microprocessor address, data, and control lines (plus many others) readily available.

Brief History of Product Development

     The HERO MEMCOM BOARD was first conceived to remove the problem of having to handcode programs into the robot.  This was accomplished by equipping the robot with a bi-directional parallel interface chip and connecting this to an identical chip on a APPLE computer via a long ribbon cable.  Driver software in both the robot and APPLE allowed fast download of programs developed for the APPLE using a 6800 CROSS ASSEMBLER.

      This interface made it so easy to develop programs for the robot that it wasn’t long until programs were written which filled up available memory. This led to the addition of 30K of RAM.

      The Serial port was added in order to make the board as useful as possible to owners who might have development computers other than the APPLE.  The upload/download software was converted to serial and burned into an EPROM so it would be unnecessary to load in the program with a cassette recorder.

      The onboard experiments area did not allow for advanced interfacing so we included on our board a large area where wire wrapped experiments can be assembled. We made available all the CPU address, data, and control lines, plus a host of others.