Hi SCELBI fans,

Based on scarcity of reports, it may not seem like it, but I am still actively working on the SCELBI 8B card set. It is pretty tedious work, and reporting every new set of tweaks to the layout is not very exciting, so I haven’t been reporting ongoing progress.

To be honest, I prefer exploring new projects, rather than revisiting old ones. Though the SCELBI 8B is “new”, it leverages so much of the 8H design, that it really seems more like revisiting the 8H, than doing something new.

At this moment, I am going through final design checks of the SCELBI 8B backplane, memory expansion, and 4K SRAM PCB layouts. I already have quotes and have done DFM checks with my PCB supplier. I think I will probably build up an very basic 8B system without I/O in a temporary chassis in order to get these cards checked out. This is so I can offer the PCBs for sale for those of you who can’t wait for the whole package. Based on what I know at the moment, I might be ordering PCBs in as little as a week or two from now.

The chassis sheet metal and the EPROM card will come a little later as follow on efforts.

After that, my next efforts will probably be the SCELBI keyboard and oscilloscope interfaces. Those will be “new” to me, so will be a lot more fun to do than the 8B has been. The O-scope interface poses some interesting challenges, as we don’t have any original software for it. We will have to craft some drivers using only the hardware implementation as a reference.