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SBC6120 "Mini" Front Panel

Nice work @SteveHere and @thunter0512 , glad to see some others in the wild.

I know I designed this to be cheap to build, but after seeing "the stack" above, has me thinking again about trying to do a full color vinyl front panel sticker. Biggest issue initially was all the cheap vendors on Etsy were limited to 7 inches or less, but I now see one doing up to 8 inches (I need 7.8 inches wide) for a little over a buck a sticker in qty 25. Hmm....
 
I actually like the white front panel. :)

The only thing I am not 100% happy about are the 3D printed parts I got made in black Nylon.
As Hideehoo wrote it may well be that the problems are specific to the material and may not exist with PLA.

I think the following improvements could be made to the 3D parts if the problems are not Nylon related (or if someone would like to use Nylon for better durability than PLA):
  • increased (at least double) the wall thickness of the base plate and the top case - this will also require a somewhat longer reset button extender.
  • the slide switch extenders are very loose on the 3 slide switches and won't operate; this may be because of the type of slide switches I got.
  • the rotary knob adapter is a little loose, both on the rotary switch side and the knob side. (I used some sticky tape to add a bit of thickness).
Although I have a Creality Ender 5, I don't have the skills and know-how to do these modifications (let alone designing something from scratch). Even my attempts at printing other people's designs are poor. :(

Another minor problem is that the rotary switch throw of 45 degrees is a little too big compared to the division on the dress panel (FLAGS, AC, MQ, MD). The "MD" and "FLAGS" don't quite line up with the switch positions.
This could easily be fixed by a minor update of the dress panel, but it is just minor cosmetics.

Overall I am extremely happy with Hideehoo's creation.

Many of us came too late for the Spare Time Gismos version and were longing for a front panel after the Retrobrew folks released the SBC6120-RBC.
Hideehoo had the right skill set to recreate a beautiful and compact version.

Thank you Chris for doing this and sharing your effort with us!!!
 
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I think doing full color for the dress panel is a great idea. Let us know if you decide to go down that route.
 
I have downloaded and installed DesignSpark Mechanical Explorer.
The case design file "SBC6120-RBC Front Panel Case.rsdocx" opens nicely and I can view the various components.
Making changes is not obvious for someone who has never played with mechanical CAD programs before.
There are some tutorials on the DesignSpark website. Hopefully I can learn enough to make the case thicker and produce an STL file to then print.
 
I managed to increase the thickness of the top case and the bottom plate, but Ultimaker Cura is unable slice the STL file:

Unable to slice.png

The build volume should be fine for the Creality Ender 5 I am trying to slice for.

I have also tried with the Chris's original top case and bottom plate STL files, but get the same error. Strangely all the smaller parts slice fine.

I am using Cura 4.8.0. I will try and upgrade to the latest version.
 
I sliced the modified case parts (bottom plate and top case) in PrusaSlicer and overnight attempted a PLA print of the bottom plate with my Creality Ender 5.

Today morning it was almost "finished", but it printed about 50% in the air without extruding any filament. I assume somehow the nozzle got blocked at about 50%. Why is anybody's guess.

I think these 3D printers are just annoying toys requiring infinite experimentation and patience to fine-tune and modify to get poor results nevertheless. I came to the conclusion that hobby grade 3D printers are ideal for someone who's primary hobby is 3D printing.

I am interested in the hardware and software of old computers and would like to spend my time on them, not exploring the unpredictable world of 3D printing.

3D printing should be just a tool to occasionally get some parts made or repaired. None of my other tools require this level of experimentation and fine-tuning and still produce poor results or complete failures like my print attempt last night.

Maybe back in 2019 I just bought the wrong 3D printer, but after many upgrades to make it usable it still doesn't reliably produce quality prints. It was sitting unused on a shelf for the past few years and I regret wasting my time and money on it.

I briefly considered buying the highly recommended "Bambu Lab P1S" 3D printer at A$1459.00 but fortunately my sanity returned before I pushed the "buy" button. The P1S is meant to work out of the box and produce quality prints at high speed, but I don't believe the hype.

I may need a 3D printed part once or twice a year, so getting stuff professionally printed by JLCPCB makes much more sense and is more cost effective than to continue with these toy printers.

Sorry for the rant.
 
thunter0512 said:
Maybe back in 2019 I just bought the wrong 3D printer, but after many upgrades to make it usable it still doesn't reliably produce quality prints. It was sitting unused on a shelf for the past few years and I regret wasting my time and money on it.

I briefly considered buying the highly recommended "Bambu Lab P1S" 3D printer at A$1459.00 but fortunately my sanity returned before I pushed the "buy" button. The P1S is meant to work out of the box and produce quality prints at high speed, but I don't believe the hype.
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I cannot speak for the Bambu Lab printers, but my Prusa Mk4 was absolutely plug and play. I've put almost a week's worth of print time on it without a single glitch. It's self aligning, including Z-axis and extremely well supported by the vendor and community. Very, very glad I didn't start with a hobby printer.
 
Consumer 3D printing can be broken up into roughly two groups with some overlap.
  1. A tool for making parts.
  2. A hobby in and of itself involving the seemingly continuous upgrades to the printer systems.
A friend of mine who introduced me to 3D printing and had 3 printers was firmly in camp 2 but had no desire to be there. I have a Creality CR10 which has almost nothing but the original frame left. It is fairly reliable, probably on par with the Prusa Mk3. And I have a scratch built core XY setup which makes excellent prints. I mentioned to my friend the Bambu labs printers and how it looked to me like they were a huge step forward. He had not been paying any attention to 3D printing for a couple of years. The next thing I knew he had bought a Carbon X1 and was sending me pictures of the parts it was making right out of the box. A week later he admitted he had bought a second one he liked it so much. The worst parts the X1 has printed are on par with the best parts my scratch built machine can do. The surface finish is spectacular.

Bambu appears to have done so much right that it is basically Bambu, Prusa, and then a long way down everyone else, if your goal is to just have a printer that works. It looks like the others are starting to scramble to catch up with Bambu but I don't think any of the other manufacturers quite understands what Bambu has done.

If all you are planning on ever printing is PLA then the much less expensive A1 and A1 mini seem to also make amazing prints but I have not seen any of those in person.

I want an X1. I just can't justify it when my scratch built printer makes almost as good of parts and is almost as fast. Also my scratch built machine has a build volume of 450x450x450 mm so I can make good sized parts although not quite 19" rack width which should have been my goal in the Y dimension. The X1 can do 256x256x256 mm which is more than enough for lots of applications.
 
The 1903 Wright Flyer was indeed a pretty crappy airplane.

But showed that heavier than air flight was possible.

Within a few short years orders of magnitude improvements in the state of the art made the Flyer look like a joke.

My Ender 3 was a cheap piece of crap out of the box.. The operative word here is cheap. I simply could not justify the cost of a Prusa at the time. I climbed the learning curve by making parts to make the Ender 3 useful enough to print usable parts most of the time. Luckily, the community provided downloadable files for most if not all of what was needed. I have managed to print things with uses other than making the Ender behave, but I fight to design new parts using anything more complicated than TinkerCAD which is targeted towards kids as young as 8. Don't laugh until you've tried Blender.

Pros are doing pro quality work using the Bambu Lab X1 Carbon right out of the box. Were I to start over again I would get one if the cost was within my reach. But keep in mind that the Bambu Lab machine cost 10x what an Ender 3 will.


P.S. Some filaments are conductive. You should probably take that into consideration when selecting materials to print with.
 
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I finally received my hacked case, base plate and reset button 3D printed in PLA. The result is quite pleasing and much more sturdy than the first Nylon version I got from JLCPCB. There is no more flexing when you toggle in programs via the front panel switches. The assembled unit is much heavier and sits very nicely on my desk.

You will need longer screws attaching the base plate to the case. You will also need longer screws to attach the DB9 to the case.
 
thunter0512 said:
You will need longer screws attaching the base plate to the case. You will also need longer screws to attach the DB9 to the case.
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Tom: Could you be specific about the lengths in each case? I still live in SAE-land; metric hardware I don't have much of "in stock".

What are the specific advantages of your new design? I still haven't committed to getting the parts printed and am unsure which way to go!
 
pbirkel@gmail.com said:
Tom: Could you be specific about the lengths in each case? I still live in SAE-land; metric hardware I don't have much of "in stock".

What are the specific advantages of your new design? I still haven't committed to getting the parts printed and am unsure which way to go!
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Paul, I made the base and the case 2 mm thicker which means you need screws which are 2 mm longer than what Chris designed for (8 mm versus 6 mm). The same applies to the DB9 UART connector. The screws need to be 2 mm longer than the originals. I had all these in "stock" in supposedly all metric Australia ( the reality is much more confusing - we still use lots of "imperial" nonsense).

The specific advantage of the modified design is a much more robust and heavy duty case. Of course it also means you use more filament and it takes more time to print. Before I unfortunately chose to get the case printed in Nylon which made it very "flexy" and just not fit for purpose. I am not convinced that PLA in the original thickness would be much more sturdy. The modified design is robust and heavy and sits better on my table without being pulled/pushed/knocked-over by power and serial port cabling. To print it you need a bit more filament, but the cost difference is negligible. I used 100% infill for the print.

I am very happy with Chris's design. The sturdy case is the icing on the cake.

Now if only I could figure out why the SBC6120-RBC causes the FP6120 (both original and Chris's design) display to freeze when executing a 4 word count program, but Bob Armstrong's SBC6120 works perfectly with both versions of the FP6120. Note it is not that the 4 word program freezes, but only the panel LED display freezes - the program happily continues to run on the SBC6120-RBC.

Note that this "freezing" has nothing to do with the FP6120 version (Bob's original or Chris's new design). The problem follows the SBC6120-RBC. The problem does not exist when I use Bob's original SBC6120.
 
hideehoo said:
Alright, I think I'm ready to declare this one working fully working. Played around with Deep Thought last night and all the switches and LED's worked as expected. Originally couldn't get anything to work on the data row except for in MD mode, but that was because I had failed to enable the 30 Hz jumper/switch which drives the refresh of those LED's when not displaying the data bus. Another doh! moment here.

Still want to tweak the cases files a bit and print another copy, but otherwise went together first try.

I've started to publish everything at https://github.com/djtersteegc/sbc6120-mini-front-panel

If anyone in the US and interested in a pair of boards (main PCB and dress panel PCB) for $25 shipped, message me. I can also provide some programmed ATF22V10 and 16V8 chips if you don't have the ability to program your own. If you're outside the US, gerber files are in the repo.

And remember, this version was designed to be built cheap. PCB's excluded, I've got maybe another ~$30 into this build.

View attachment 1269905
Click to expand...
I would be interested in a circuit board. I have a running 6120 SBC. Aug atreubig@sbcglobal.net
 
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thunter0512 said:
Paul, I made the base and the case 2 mm thicker which means you need screws which are 2 mm longer than what Chris designed for (8 mm versus 6 mm). The same applies to the DB9 UART connector. The screws need to be 2 mm longer than the originals. I had all these in "stock" in supposedly all metric Australia ( the reality is much more confusing - we still use lots of "imperial" nonsense).

The specific advantage of the modified design is a much more robust and heavy duty case. Of course it also means you use more filament and it takes more time to print. Before I unfortunately chose to get the case printed in Nylon which made it very "flexy" and just not fit for purpose. I am not convinced that PLA in the original thickness would be much more sturdy. The modified design is robust and heavy and sits better on my table without being pulled/pushed/knocked-over by power and serial port cabling. To print it you need a bit more filament, but the cost difference is negligible. I used 100% infill for the print.

I am very happy with Chris's design. The sturdy case is the icing on the cake.

Now if only I could figure out why the SBC6120-RBC causes the FP6120 (both original and Chris's design) display to freeze when executing a 4 word count program, but Bob Armstrong's SBC6120 works perfectly with both versions of the FP6120. Note it is not that the 4 word program freezes, but only the panel LED display freezes - the program happily continues to run on the SBC6120-RBC.

Note that this "freezing" has nothing to do with the FP6120 version (Bob's original or Chris's new design). The problem follows the SBC6120-RBC. The problem does not exist when I use Bob's original SBC6120.
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I am building one, as I got boards from Chris. Could you post your counter program. My SBC6120-RBC runs fine. Currently it is running at 10mhz. Something that could be part of your problem is which PAL chips are you using. The older Lattice ones or the ATMEL ones. I have sets of both. My SBC currently has ATMELs in it.

Aug
AG5AT
 
atreubig said:
I am building one, as I got boards from Chris. Could you post your counter program. My SBC6120-RBC runs fine. Currently it is running at 10mhz. Something that could be part of your problem is which PAL chips are you using. The older Lattice ones or the ATMEL ones. I have sets of both. My SBC currently has ATMELs in it.

Aug
AG5AT
Click to expand...
Hi Aug,

my SBC6120-RBC runs fine too when operated via the serial port. The problem is that the front panel stops updating when the count wraps from 7777 to 0. The SBC6120-RBC continues to count and seems to do a full count cycle from 0000 to 7777 when then the front panel updates resume.

To replicate the problem, power on the system, but don't type anything on the serial console. Then enter the following count program starting from address 0000 and extended address 0000 via the front panel switches using the DEP toggle. After setting the address back to 0000 verify it via the EXAM toggle. Finally set the address back to 0000 again and then select the AC display via the rotary switch and toggle CLEAR and then CONT to start the program. Observe how the count reaches 7777 and then there is a long pause after which the count resumes at 0000.

Here is the count program (the text after the ";" is the PDP-8 instruction mnemonic):

0000: 7001 ; IAC
0001: 2101 ; ISZ 0101
0002: 5001 ; JMP 0001
0003: 5000 ; JMP 0000

If while the count is paused, you type a single character for example SPACE, the front display resumes and won't ever stop again.

If you enter and start the same program via the serial console, the count increments from 0000 to 7777 and then immediately resumes incrementing from 0000 as you would expect.

Could you please explain why you think that the PAL manufacturer (Lattice vs Atmel) may be the cause of the problem?

I am using the Atmel parts: ATF16V8BQL-15PU and ATF22V10CQZ-20PU

I used the JED files in directory "sbc6120-rbc-edition-archive-10may2018\PLD" from the SBC6120-RBC site to program the PLDs. After programming the PLDs verified OK.

I would appreciate any insights you have.

I also have an original FP6120 front panel from Bob Armstrong with an SBC6120-RBC processor board and it has the same pausing problem.
I believe the original SBC6120 processor board from Bob Armstrong works fine with either Chris's or original front panel boards.

Thanks
Tom
 
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