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Psion SSD Drive, anyone?

A project log for The Last Psion

Resurrecting Psion's SIBO/EPOC16 Platform For The 21st Century

alex-brownAlex Brown 05/15/2022 at 11:132 Comments

I wanted to put out an update about my various Psion projects. I’ve been away for a while, thanks to some mental health issues culminating in a career change. It’s only in the last week or so that I’ve felt able to look at projects like this again; projects I enjoy but for which I just didn’t have the mental energy.

I have started to work on something again, something I had kept quiet about because I didn’t want the outside pressure. But now I think that outside input might help, and I thought this would be the best place to post about it.

TL;DR: I’m designing a Psion SSD Drive, based on the RP2040, that will work over USB-C.

I had originally thought about using the ESP32 for this, and the early stages of this project were based on the ESP32. But I don’t need WiFi and I really want to play with the RP2040’s PIOs!

Near the end of last year I decided to take the code from SIBODUMP and SIBOIMG and squash them together on an ESP32. With the help of some friends at my local Hackspace, I picked some level shifters that do an excellent job of converting 3.3v to 5v and (with one chip) back again. I bought a small stock in case I blew one up (which I did), plus some breakout boards. I also bought a Raspberry Pi Pico, simply because it was cheap and I thought it might be fun. Then, with more help from the Hackspace lads, I worked out what circuitry I’d need to write to a Flash SSD. Finally, I tried to design a board, got too bogged down in the details, got annoyed with the project and put it in my Psion cabinet, where it sat for 6 months.

Last week I decided I’d take another look at the project. Long story short and almost on a whim, I decided to get the Pico out and try converting the code over. I then discovered TinyUSB, and in a moment decided that the RP2040 would be far more fun to play with than the ESP32.

To be fully compliant with the Psion SIBO HDK, I need 4 pins: DATA, CLK, DATA_DIR (to say which direction DATA is going), and CLK_OE (to disable CLK when it’s not in use). CLK_OE isn’t necessary for communication, but it makes the drive fully compliant with the HDK, so I’d like to try to implement it.

For USB communication, I’m planning on using TinyUSB in two ways. I’d like to make this a block device, but I’m not clear on how to do this well. But I would really like to implement a dummy ethernet device and run a web interface. This is going to give users a huge amount of flexibility, plus make the Drive as cross-platform as possible. I’ll probably keep some sort of serial comms available for debugging, too.

I want the Drive to be able to do regular read-write actions, but also rip and burn SSD images, show full details of the SSD hardware, and (if I can work out how) show the battery status of a RAM SSD.

I’m currently prototyping with a Raspberry Pi Pico and the Arduino libraries on PlatformIO. As time goes on I will probably try to use the Arduino libraries less and go straight for the RP2040 C/C++ SDK, but for now it’s made the code a lot easier to port to the Pico. Even switching from Arduino’s digitalWrite() to the SDK’s gpio_put() has given the code a huge speed boost; toggling CLK goes from about 350KHz to well over 20MHz, and that’s without using PIO. I’m also still not sure if PlatformIO is making my life easier or harder…

My next steps in no particular order are:

I’d really love to hear your thoughts on this. I’ll be working on it at my own pace when time allows, so don’t expect it to be done in a month or even in a year. I haven’t created a GitHub repo yet, but I will once the code is at a suitable point. But I can see that I’m going to need some input from the outside world to make this work.

As an aside, rest assured that I will be revisiting the WiFi Pack at some point, but it’s not my priority right now.

Discussions

Mark Warner wrote 05/15/2022 at 21:30 point

interesting project.  I’ve seen some of your earlier posts.  I’m currently learning how the flash ssd cards are configured.  Not that experienced so it’s been a fun learning experience.  So far upgraded a 128k to 512k and about to try and figure out how 2mb plus cards work.  Great to see you’re active in this space again.

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Alex Brown wrote 05/16/2022 at 08:09 point

Thanks! Yeah, the way Psion split the cards up is interesting. It's really interesting to hear that you're successfully upgrading SSDs - I've not tried that yet. Essentially the SSDs with more than one memory chip are split into multiple "devices" and the OS stitches them together. ASIC4 and ASIC5 really don't do much more clever than giving the machine the data it wants.

You could theoretically make a 128MB SSD out of four 32MB chips, but you'd need to make a new PCB. You might even be able to make a 256MB SSD, but the HDK isn't totally clear on that. 

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