Programming volatile memory boards in older Icom Rigs and radio upgrades

[Radio Tech]

My adapter is for standard device programmer (eproms, etc.), I have used the GALEP3 with no problems, probably a chinese TL866 is also ok, on the programmer software select a Dallas DS1220 NVRAM (Non Volatile RAM) chip to be programmed.

Cool, I may give it a try also. Banggood is sending me  TL866 programmer for free when they get more in stock. This will replace my old DOS based programmer. That still works btw.

N2CBU software is obviously non compatible with my modified files, but it works only on old DOS PC, the adapter showed in my previous message permit to recover ICOM RAM boards using actual PC (Windows) and a more or less recent standard device programmer.
Depends on how it is programmed, Arduino is a platform that can be adapted to many applications, not just a programmer.

73's

Interesting, I am way behind in my dos programming skills.  I do have a windows 3.1 machine here that seems to work fairly good.
Not sure what the IC is on your board maybe I over looked it.  Looks very simple to put together.

[HighPrecision]

Not sure what the IC is on your board maybe I over looked it.  Looks very simple to put together.

The DIP-24 in my PCB image is a plug soldered behind the board, to be inserted in programmer ZIF socket, in PCB front there are 2 strips (8 and 12 pins) for ICOM RAM board insertion.

See the DS1220 datasheet to check electrical connections between ICOM RAM and the programmer socket.

73's

[Radio Tech]

The DIP-24 in my PCB image is a plug soldered behind the board, to be inserted in programmer ZIF socket, in PCB front there are 2 strips (8 and 12 pins) for ICOM RAM board insertion.

See the DS1220 datasheet to check electrical connections between ICOM RAM and the programmer socket.

73's

Brilliant!
I do notice dip-24 on the board now.
That is nice. Trying to do too many things here at one time lol.
The 4 resistors 1k? I may try this with my old programmer.
Thanks.

[HighPrecision]

The 4 resistors 1k? I may try this with my old programmer.

These resistor are not critical, I've used 2k2, but 1k is ok   

[AF6LJ]

It's good to see this project moving along.
Can't say as much for my current project....
Stalled for a day or two.

[Radio Tech]

Yes I agree Sue. So nice when folks can get together and figure out a problem.
What project you working on?


So Banggood notified me and said that it will be a month before they have the TL866 programmers back in stock. So I told them to hold off.
I found one last night here in the states from a Florida seller,  A few bucks more but that is ok.

In the mean time I am looking at my current old dos programmer.
It has it's own card that plugs into the  PC. This thing was a work horse back in the day when I used it.  I am looking through it to see if there are any chips listed that is compatible with the ram board. If so I should be able to build an adapter to accept the ram board like HighPrecision has shown.

My old programmer is a Modular Circuits Technology 4 gang programmer.  Pictures below. The software will run in demo mode on my Win 7 machine so I can show screen shots. Zip file of the program and all my old projects attached.  The program executable file is EPP-04 for those playing along.   It opens a dos window and loads the program.


A view of the main program window.



Here you select the chip type. I always wonder if there is a way to add more types to this or manually add different chips.



This window lets you change chip manufacture



This window lets you select programming algorithm



Here is a pic of the old programmer.

[Radio Tech]

This morning I decided to do a bit of old school proto-typing.
 I made an adapter to plug in my old programmer (or any other programmer) and fixed it to accept the ram board.  I will attached the pins with wires so it can e torn down and re-wired.

So I need to learn a bit about the pins on the ram board and what each pin is doing.

[Ian.M]

IMHO coding an Arduino sketch to interface to the board will be *FAR* easier than trying to hardware hack an old DOS era EPROM programmer to do so.  However if your C programming skills are non-existent and you've never dabbled in any other procedural programming language, YMMV.

Parallel EPROMs have separate /CE, /OE and Vpp pins and possibly a PGM pin.   The RAM used on the ICOM memory board, and thus the board as a whole, doesn't.  It has three control pins, one of which: WP, is the write protect for the lower 1/4 of the memory (via the 74LS32), which in a programming jig is disabled by tying it high, and can therefore be ignored. The other two are AD10, which drives the RAM's  /CS pin, and /WR which drives the RAM's /WE pin.

A RAM read cycle only requires /CS to go (or be) low.  However for a write cycle, /CS and /WE must be sequenced low and released in the correct order to avoid a data bus conflict as there is no /OE pin.  Its unlikely that any EPROM algorithm has compatible signal sequencing - you'll have to scope it and see, without the RAM board, but with 10K pullup resistors on the data bus.   As some EPROM algorithms are interactive - reading back each location to check if its programmed then calculating and applying an overprogramming pulse (or pulses), that may not be good enough and you may have to test with a blank EPROM to see the full signal sequence.

You must deal with the PGM voltage - at the very least it will need limiting to logic levels before input into the logic you will need to add to derive /CS and /WR from the EPROM signals.  Also many of the EPROM programmer's algorithms will boost the supply voltage when programming, but over 5.5V is undesirable for the ICOM board.

Hopefully you wont blow up the RAM board . . . .

A universal programmer is a different and far easier beast to make an adaptor board for, as it will already have algorithms for programming NVRAM modules, which keep all signals within the 5V logic range, and with luck, one of its RAM algorithms will have the right sequencing and timings for a uPD444.

[Radio Tech]

I can already tell you mu coding skills are basically non existent.  I have not played with this type of stuff since the 80's, a lot have changed since then.  Even then I was not that good at it, I could copy and program from one chip to another.

My TL866 will be here Thursday. So maybe I can adapt this board to it.
As far as Arduino
? I agree it may be the BEST way to go on this.  But at the moment  until I can learn a bit about it I am dead in the water. I have watched quite a few videos on it and looks very interesting.
Only one video I found was close to really getting into eprom programming was from this guy below.

Thanks for your information.

[Radio Tech]

Well, after a bit more  fumbling around with the N2CBU programmer I now see why I am not able to read the ram board.  I connected the logic analyzer to J2 (small connector) and looked at the LA and saw nothing while reading the chip.  I did not look at clock and reset. But this does confirm that my parallel port is not seeing the ram board. So do not know if there is a IRQ conflict or the port is not working.
I will have to investigate this more.

[Co6aka]

Which OS are you running the RAM board software on? And, are you certain of the address the parallel port is mapping to?

[Radio Tech]

Which OS are you running the RAM board software on? And, are you certain of the address the parallel port is mapping to?

I have tried windows 98 on a 386 machine and windows 3.1 on a 286 machine.  No I am not certain. I have not used this type of stuff since the 80's. I did go in and change settings in the bios but same results.  I connected the logic analyzer (above) to the 386 machine and when reading and writing from the N2CBU program I noticed nothing on the outputs.  That really did not tell me much as if the port is not working or the program is not seeing the port. So I am out of options on that.  I do not know how to do any further testing with it. Thanks.

[CJay]

OK, back, lost a few days over Christmas with the flu or some such that confined me to bed between bouts of all sorts of nastiness.

So, Buddy, if your programmer supports reading Dallas DS1220 Non Volatile RAM or ST MK48Z02 I'd consider using the settings for them so there's no chance of an 'accident' with VPP being applied to a RAM board but it might be easier with the arduino sketch.

All the bita arrived so I can build a clone RAM board on breadboard for testing, over the next few days I'm intending to test and modify the code I have so I can read and display the content of the RAM board in a serial monitor window before writng it back to a blank board..

[Radio Tech]

OK, back, lost a few days over Christmas with the flu or some such that confined me to bed between bouts of all sorts of nastiness.

So, Buddy, if your programmer supports reading Dallas DS1220 Non Volatile RAM or ST MK48Z02 I'd consider using the settings for them so there's no chance of an 'accident' with VPP being applied to a RAM board but it might be easier with the arduino sketch.

All the bita arrived so I can build a clone RAM board on breadboard for testing, over the next few days I'm intending to test and modify the code I have so I can read and display the content of the RAM board in a serial monitor window before writng it back to a blank board..

Sorry to hear about he flu, that is nasty stuff. Hope you are feeling much better.

So where I am today. I gave up on the thought of using my older eprom programmer. The algorithms are not right to be playing around with the ram board.  Remember this thing is from the early 80's and no support for it anymore.

So I do have my brand new Arduino in and trying to learn a few things with it.
Today about 30 minutes ago my new Mini Pro TL866 programmer arrived.  I loaded the software and reading old chips from the 80's.  I just was able to read a TMS  27C128 chip that I loaded in 1988. It was programmed from the old programmer. I feel like I just reached the 21st century!

Sounds great on building the unit. Keep us informed on your findings and thank you very much for the help.





I built a proto type board to plug into the TL866 also. Crude but should work.  It is designed after the board layout the High Precision posted.

[AF6LJ]

What I am seeing in terms of the output doesn't make sense.
There should be an address and a single byte of data since this ram unit is only eight bits.
should look something like this.
001  1A
002  03
003  F8....
Etc

[Radio Tech]

What I am seeing in terms of the output doesn't make sense.
There should be an address and a single byte of data since this ram unit is only eight bits.
should look something like this.
001  1A
002  03
003  F8....
Etc

You talking about the screen shot above?  That has nothing to do with the ram board. Was just a test to make sure the TL866 programmer was working. I read a TMI 27C128 chip. THe programmer was fairly easy to get working.


I am trying to read a good ram board but getting nothing but FF"s back. I selected Dallas DS1220

[Radio Tech]

Well well well.
You guys are not going to believe this.  I mean you probably want lol.   

I took HighPrecisions board and file and put it together.

wait for it..............

I programmed the dead board! 
Installed it in the radio and working like a charm.    Beauty!
So we now know we can program these boards with his modified files and a TL866 MiniPro programmer.
A big thanks to HighPrecision and thumbs up to you 

Now to even get this more modernized we can now focus on the Arduino programming.  That will make all this complete and give us several options for programming these rm boards.

Big thanks and thumbs up to all you guys for helping this project along.  You guys are the best. Now we can save the originality of these old radios.

Video to come. Hope you guys do not mind being mentioned in it.  But have to give applause to the ones that made it happen.   

[Ian.M]

Great.  That will make it a lot easier to develop the Arduino Icom programmer sketch, as you can now preload the board with known contents, for the sketch to read, and also, when you add code to write the board, you can check it reads back as expected on the TL866.

Start with LEDs (+ series resistors) on all pins you plan to use for the address and control lines and get them sequencing correctly with a delay in the loop before you connect the board the first time. When you connect the board, don't forget the 1K series resistors in the data lines to prevent damage if you get the /CS, /WR and data pin direction control sequencing wrong.

[AF6LJ]

Well well well.
You guys are not going to believe this.  I mean you probably want lol.   

I took HighPrecisions board and file and put it together.

wait for it..............

I programmed the dead board! 
Installed it in the radio and working like a charm.    Beauty!
So we now know we can program these boards with his modified files and a TL866 MiniPro programmer.
A big thanks to HighPrecision and thumbs up to you 

Now to even get this more modernized we can now focus on the Arduino programming.  That will make all this complete and give us several options for programming these rm boards.

Big thanks and thumbs up to all you guys for helping this project along.  You guys are the best. Now we can save the originality of these old radios.

Video to come. Hope you guys do not mind being mentioned in it.  But have to give applause to the ones that made it happen.   

That's great!!

[Radio Tech]

Great.  That will make it a lot easier to develop the Arduino Icom programmer sketch, as you can now preload the board with known contents, for the sketch to read, and also, when you add code to write the board, you can check it reads back as expected on the TL866.

Start with LEDs (+ series resistors) on all pins you plan to use for the address and control lines and get them sequencing correctly with a delay in the loop before you connect the board the first time. When you connect the board, don't forget the 1K series resistors in the data lines to prevent damage if you get the /CS, /WR and data pin direction control sequencing wrong.

That sounds like great advice. Will be fun learning how to do this in Arduino.
Thanks for your suggestions.

[Radio Tech]

That's great!!

Agreed Sue !

Cannot believe how easy that was once I obtain the proper information and tools.

[Radio Tech]

[W2NAP]

good deal it worked!

[Radio Tech]

good deal it worked!

Thanks, I possible by the great help in this thread.

[AF6LJ]

Now the next step is to hack the firmware to enable RX below 100 KHZ.