Designers Corner with Prof. Mike Smith
Part 1
Writing specifications and avoiding specifications
After a few weeks of playing with our network test setup, we felt we had
enough experience to design our first prototype board. I ended up in charge of the analog
section, since I claimed to know something about analog design (and the design could be
copied from a Level One application note anyway). Hamish took responsibility for the
entire digital side. We could have taken time to write a specification or plan, but we
didn’t. We completed the design in less than a week on the realization that summer
was already slipping by. We will describe our first prototype board design in more detail
in next month’s column.
|
|
Our first prototype board. Ethernet comes in at the top left and
that’s it. There is no processor, no software, no operating system. We call this
board the Demonstation; it should have been the Demonstration board, but we made a
spelling mistake on the silkscreen. The name stuck and we all became Demons. Here is the
chief code Demon, Hamish Fallside, the key engineer on the “Chips on the Net”
project. |
Resources
The XCoNET
website (and a backup)
describe the “Chips on the Net” or XCoNET project in more detail.
Table of contents
Previous