Built one!

[RussellSenior]

I got a set of parts from Mouser on Friday, picked up the board and case yesterday afternoon at about 2::30 pm and put it together last night:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/gVx6JYac1GBZWsRx6.

First impressions: It works! Second impression, the USB drive seems very slow. PHI2 is set to 8000 kHz, RESB: 0.001 ms (auto), but ]LOAD tetricks.rp6502 from a 8GB HP v165w (rev 1100) USB drive takes about 90 seconds. LOAD star_swarms.rp6502 takes 3 minutes. Is that normal? I tried a 4GB USB drive before and it was also slow.RIA Version 0.9 and VGA Version 0.9.

[RussellSenior]

[rumbledethumps]

Should only take a second or three to load those files. Try a different hub if it's not the drive.

[rumbledethumps]

Check if the install command is also slow.

[RussellSenior]

install basic.rp6502 takes about the same time as load basic.rp6502. Running basic rom from the RIA is fast, starts in less than a second.

[rumbledethumps]

It all points to a problem with the USB bus. You need to consider every device, cable, power supply, and interfering source. Nothing like this has been reported before.

[RussellSenior]

Someone reported a particular OTG hub worked for them, I have a couple on order. If I take the hub out of the loop entirely, and plug a USB thumb directly into the OTG cable (converting to a single USB A host port), I see the same slowness. I have the power coming from my laptop USB port now (it has been on a rated-1.2A 5V power supply) so I can see the serial console.

status
Picocomputer 6502
RIA Version 0.9
VGA Version 0.9
USB: 1 device
1: MSC 7.7 GB hp       v165w            rev 1100

It can't be the hub's fault, because I see same thing with no hub. And, when plugged in, the usb keyboard seems to work fine.

[RussellSenior]

Aha! Tried a third USB storage device (actually an 4GB SD card in an adapter) and suddenly everything is reasonable fast! Super weird that it didn't like my name-brand USB2 thumb drive.

[rumbledethumps]

I got the USB drive from Russel today. It worked on the Picocomputer but took about 10 seconds to mount. I checked it under Windows and it also took 10 seconds to mount. It was partitioned for EFI, so I tried to format it under windows, which failed. Tried diskpart, failed. Finally I changed it to GPT, formatted, changed back to MBR, formatted again, and it worked. Still takes 10 seconds to mount on either Windows or Picocomputer.

Conclusion: This drive is cursed.

[RussellSenior]

I think it works reasonably well on Linux. At least I don't recall weirdness there.

[RussellSenior]

For example, a different but also discovered to be problematic usb drive: Bus 003 Device 012: ID 03f0:3d07 HP, Inc v115w:

If I insert it on Ubuntu 24.04, it automounts in about 4 seconds (counted outloud). If I umount it and then run:

$ time sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt

real 0m0.067s
user 0m0.004s
sys 0m0.005s

$ mount | grep sda1
/dev/sda1 on /mnt type ext4 (rw,relatime)

$ umount /dev/sda1
$ sudo mkfs.vfat /dev/sda1
mkfs.fat 4.2 (2021-01-31)
$ time sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt

real 0m0.070s
user 0m0.005s
sys 0m0.008s