Microelectronics | ISA Floppy Disk Drive and Serial Controller

Synopsis

The ISA Floppy Disk Drive and Serial Controller is an 8-bit ISA card designed by Sergey Kiselev to be used with XT computers. I received the bare PCB from Martin of the Czech Republic for free, and I decided to construct it.

This card is very simple and requires only a couple of hours to fully assemble.

At the moment, I don't have any plans to use this controller card. But in the near future I would like to build an XT single board computer (SBC) to experiment with 8-bit designs. Then it will come in handy.

Construction and Pictures

This is a small 2-layer printed circuit board that was made in China. It appears to be of good quality. However, I would've lifted the soldermask from the card edge connector.

The factory left an ugly board identification string on the solder side. There are some scratches on the card edge connector on the lower right side of the PCB. Then again there is that soldermask on the edge connector.

I have used mostly recovered electronic parts for this build. I was keeping these blue IC sockets for a longtime in the spare parts bin. Now I have decided to give them a try.

All parts have been soldered.

Then I installed the steel mounting bracket. Next, I inserted all the integrated circuits into their respective sockets.

Many thanks to Sergey Kiselev that designed the card and to Martin for the free PCB.