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.

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