IDE Devil Time-Line

18.december 2005

Februar, 3. starting thinking about IDE Devil
Februar, 9. PCB designed, electrical parts ordered
Februar,17. PCB manufactured
Februar, 21.

            

ISP programmer for Atmel AVR MCU's done
electrical parts soldered on IDE devil
Februar, 23. ISP programmer fixed and fully operational
Februar, 25. first debug messages received via RS232 from IDE devil
Februar, 27. 850 MB HDD connected, some initialization of IDE drive working
Februar, 28. first succesfully read sector from HDD, also some bugfixes
March, 1. strange self-reseting bug fixed
March, 3. Master and Slave support added
March, 4. Slave detection improvement.
Tried to connect CD ROM but it did not work.
March, 6. sector writing added
March, 13. tried to connect 80 GB HDD, mostly OK, but some little trouble
March, 16. thinking about to make a batch of IDE devil
April, 2. IDE devil connected to Atari ST, the ST was freezing
April, 3. ST freezing fixed - it was only interference with PC
April, 4. fixed some trouble with FDD functionality on ST due to bad levels on ACSI port from IDE devil
April, 5. kicked out 74LS245 because of data loosing
April, 6.

            

kicked out two transistors (they were used as invertors)
some first data read from ST
April, 7. trying to fix timing problems, some of those are fixed now
April, 13. decomposing the Link96 to find out what's in it
June, 19.

            

starting to rewrite the code from assembler to C (ICC AVR)
new PCB designed and auto-routed in EagleCAD
June,    21.

            

the new C-code partialy fixed, initialization is OK
trying to cut down HDD spin-up time when it's single
June, 25. some trouble with sector reading, but LBA-to-CHS conversion done
June, 26. sector reading fixed, CHS mode works OK
June, 28. reading from ACSI port is now OK
July, 2. some trouble with HDDRIVER time-outs
August, 2. HDDRIVER debuging to find out what commands it sends
August, 24. fixed some bugs related to INQUIRY
August, 25.

            

some small utility for reading and writing done (based on sources NOAHDI)
Bus-Scan partialy works with HDDRUTIL
August, 26.

            

ST reads bootsector from IDE drive using IDE devil (sector-reading request by my util.)
some bugfixes
August, 27. some serious timing-related problem appeared, strong need for logical analyzer
August, 30. little bugfixes that helped a bit with timing-related problem
September, 8. some measuring on logical analyzer in a lab at my university, not helped anything (very old analyzer, not useful)
September, 10.

              

serious bug fixed - not saved register in interrupt handler
schematics drawn and published
September, 11. HDDRUTIL has trouble when partitioning or formating by reading bootsector
September, 18.

              

using SCSI_MON using RS232 from ST to PC to show SCSI commands issued by HDDRIVER
fixed wrong SC, ASC, ASCQ codes returned by IDE devil
September, 20. I was unsuccesful by writing utility which uses HDDRIVER as low-level disk driver
September, 21. state analysis of ACSI draw and published on web
December, 4. more detailed info written and published about how things work in IDE devil
December, 18. this time-line was written