Extending to Bread Board for rapid prototyping
It is quite easy to extend the SUPERPROTO to a reusable breadboard. The picture below shows the Blinking LED Experiment set up on a bread board connected to the SUPERPROTO. Once this sort of setup is configured there is no limit to the number of interesting experiments that could be performed with your Apple II and the SUPERPROTO.
Solder the ends of a ribbon cable to the port outputs of the 6522A VIA and connect the other end to a DIP header and plug into the breadboard. Then run power and ground wires from the VIAs on the SUPERPROTO to the power and ground buses of the breadboard. Any additional connections that happen to be needed could be made in a similar fashion.
A couple of tips for a 6522A VIA breadboard extension. First alternate every other wire between port A and port B. This will keep port A together on one side of the DIP at the breadboard and port B on the other side.
This could also be done with the direct Apple II bus connections, but more care is needed in managing wire length and fanout.
Be aware that Radio Shack sells an inexpensive perf board that can be used to move breadboard designs onto. This is ideal for projects where you don't want to dedicate a SUPERPROTO or breadboard, but want a permanent implementation. In the image above, I moved the 1101 SRAM tester (see the experiments section) onto this board. The Radio Shack part number is 276-170. Current price is $3.19, making this a very affordable option. The power and ground connections are made with Radio Shack terminal blocks, part number is 276-1388 - current price for a pack of these is $3.49.
It would be easy to change out this board, with a different a design. The SUPERPROTO connects to this board with a ribbon cable dip connector and several power and ground wires, connected to terminal blocks. Of course, the EEPROM needs to be reprogrammed, but this could be accomplished by downloading new code from disk or an Ipod, each time the application is changed out. An easier way would be to use jumpers on the main SUPERPROTO board, to change the selected EEPROM superpage. An example can be seen here.
