Using KIM Clone I/O Pins

Like the original KIM-1, there are 16 I/O lines on the KIM Clone that can be used for your own projects. They are brought to the connector labeled “SD SYSTEM” along the top edge of the board and were meant to plug into one of our SD Card Systems for program storage. However, they are general purpose I/O lines which can be freely used for other things if the SD system is not used.

This is a portion of the schematic showing which pins on the 6532 are connected to which pins on the connector:

Don’t worry about the signal names associated with the various lines, they are the names of those signals when an SD Card System is attached.

As you can see, there are 16 IO lines, 2 ground lines, and 2 lines with +7.5… if you want to draw power from this connector for TTL/CMOS circuits then you need to add your own +5 volt regulator! D2 prevents back-feeding power from the connector back into the KIM Clone.

On the circuit board, pins 1 and 2 are labeled but are covered by the connector, so here is a reference:

All of the odd numbered pins are on the “bottom” row while even numbered pins are on the top. Ie, the top row has pins 2, 4, 6, etc, while the bottom row has 1, 3, 5, etc. Displaying the circuit board traces on the bottom layer of the board you can clearly see the ground and power lines connected to the pins on the far right:

The datasheet for the 6532 RIOT chip is readily available on the internet, but here is an easy one:

http://archive.6502.org/datasheets/mos_6532_riot.pdf

To program the chip you basically need to set the direction of each pin of the I/O port of interest (Port A or Port B), then set the data or read the data. The base address of the chip is 1700 (hex). There are four registers:

An Example

I needed to test experimental address decoder logic and found it was easier to just plug it into the I/O ports and write some code on the KIM Clone to simulate the addresses and display what the decoder logic did:

Port A simulates address lines A11-A16 and port B has the three decoder outputs (/RAM, /IO, /EEPROM). A small program simulates all possible values of the five address bits, displays the address, reads the decoder inputs and then displays which are active. In about an hour I was able to fix one minor bug in the decoder design and perform a full unit test on how it works. Certainly not a fancy example of using I/O ports, but sometimes it far faster to build a small circuit and use software to test it rather than building a lot of hardware and manually debugging it all.