Table of Contents
Advertisement
1
Introduction
1.1
What is this thing?
This document provides detailed illustrated instructions on building and using
the P112 single board computer. This board has the footprint of a typical 3.5"
floppy drive and may be mounted on the underside of one. Its CPU is a Zilog
Z180 (an enhanced version of the venerable Z80). A multifunction I/O chip
provides serial ports, a parallel port, and support for up to four floppy drives.
A terminal, or at least a null-modem cable connected to another computer
running a terminal-emulator is required to communicate with the P112.
The P112 was designed by David Brooks in 1996. He sold boards with the
five surface-mount components preinstalled for about a year, then stopped due
to lack of demand. Since then, the P112 has gained a reputation as a well-
designed machine for running CP/M and similar operating systems. In late
2004, in response to growing interest in the P112 board, another run of boards
was produced by David Griffith. After a lot of work, unexpected problems, and
gnashing of teeth, kits started to ship in late 2005.
Most of the content of this manual is taken directly and usually verbatim from
two PDF files produced by David Brooks in 1996 as documentation for the first
run of P112 boards. Other content comes from documentation from related
utilities written specifically for the P112.
This introduction, assembly instructions, software documentation, and pho-
tographs were created by David Griffith.
1.2
What do I need to know?
You should know the basics of soldering. Because of the small size of this board
and certain delicate parts, I do not reccomend this as for a first soldering project.
Get a little project kit from Jameco and practice there first.
1.3
What's in this kit?
In this kit you will find the following:
One four-layer printed circuit board
A four-layer circuit board is not something one can easily make in the
garage. This board has two surface-mount chips (the CPU and the IO
controller) and some discrete devices already mounted. Since there was
no way around having those surface-mount parts, that part has been done
for you.
6
Advertisement
Table of Contents
