BlueSCSI – Open, Low Cost, DIY SCSI to SD Device – TinkerDifferent | Hacker News Reader

BlueSCSI – Open, Low Cost, DIY SCSI to SD Device – TinkerDifferent

tinkerdifferent.com

Wrong headline. From the repository:

>Hardware is licensed sperately under CC Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International. Refer to `hw/README.md`.

Therefore, despite claims of "open hardware", it is actually not so (not OSHW). A shame.

This seems to be fully intentional, as the site goes on to provide a list of "authorized" sellers. If you're not one of these "authorized" sellers, then you cannot legally make and sell this hardware.

Creator here. I wanted to give people the ability to have the ability to print them out for personal use or buy from a seller. Early in the project someone attempted to commercially take it over so I chose this licenses. Is it perfect? no. You can of course design your own, but mine are provided under that license. See some projects like Elastic, Sentry, etc have run into similar licensing issues when trying to provide something to the community for free.

Hello,

Thank you for distributing the designs. The choice of license is completely yours to make.

That is what the comment above should have said instead of complaining.

I take no issue with you choosing whatever license you want. It's your own work, after all.

My dissatisfaction is only with the Open Hardware claim, present and prominent in what I assume is your website[0]. It has a definition[1], and your choice of license does not meet it.

I do not wish for the meaning of Open Hardware to be diluted, thus the comment.

[0]: https://scsi.blue/

[1]: https://www.oshwa.org/definition/

“Open hardware” is a pretty generic term and OSHWA doesn’t have a monopoly over how people use it.

This same weak argument gets used against "open source", and while I strongly prefer "free software", I still think it's ridiculous how much people make this claim. Get your own terms. Stop trying to make the world a worse place for those who care about freedom, please.

Who is it making the world worse for besides the leeches who take it and sell it?

Making PCBs, soldering components, flashing roms, testing, selling and shipping hardware takes effort. This is true regardless of Open Hardware.

I therefore do not see anything wrong with selling Open Hardware.

As everybody can do this, the hardware itself is commoditized, and society at large does benefit.

> Making PCBs, soldering components, flashing roms, testing, selling and shipping hardware takes effort. This is true regardless of Open Hardware.

It's a lot easier to upload some zip files to JLCPCB, have them assemble it and then sell them on eBay for 4x the cost than it is to do the initial design.

It seems rare to get any contributions back to hw projects (either in pull requests etc or donations) so it's unsurprising when I see talented people give up or go with non commercial licenses.

The usefulness I find in open source projects is the ability to learn, fix things etc

>It's a lot easier to upload some zip files to JLCPCB, have them assemble it and then sell them on eBay for 4x the cost than it is to do the initial design.

but the author of BlueSCSI didnt do that initial design

"BlueSCSI created by erichelgeson is a fork of ArdSCSino-stm32" https://github.com/erichelgeson/BlueSCSI

I did do the initial design of this hardware. The ArdSCSino just mapped pins from the bluepill to a 50 pin header.

'just mapped pins' is how one could describe a pcb :)

https://github.com/ztto/ArdSCSino-stm32/blob/master/ArdSCSin...

https://github.com/ztto/ArdSCSino-stm32/tree/master/gerber

Ok. You may want to compare versions then. It seem you're very interested in it.

> It seems rare to get any contributions back to hw projects (either in pull requests etc or donations) so it's unsurprising when I see talented people give up or go with non commercial licenses.

This is 100% true. Coming from a software side I was surprised that on the embedded and hardware side everyone just forks. I did try to contact the original arscsino project to contribute back but at the time it was idle and I got no response.

I've never heard of OSHWA. I agree with the other reply that Open Hardware seems to be a pretty generic phrase.

I have a BlueSCSI for booting my Macintosh SE. It boots in seconds, which was definitely not the case when I had 20MB of spinning rust.

Also, Finder in System 6.0.8 supports 2GB volumes just fine — but shows it as “59,592K in disk 2,009,792K available.” Didn’t even implement the M suffix!

Seems similar to https://github.com/akuker/RASCSI. Would be great if there was also the other way around. It seems that usb to SCSI adapters aren't manufactured anymore due to the lack of controller chips although it is all similar at protocol level.

BlueSCSI seems to be a rebrand of https://github.com/ztto/ArdSCSino-stm32.

edit: Some improvements were added.

We list that right on the github/top of the page linked. Speed/stability improvements, adding CD support, Macintosh specifics, easier config/use, documentation, community, etc. Checkout the repo for more info.

BlueSCSI, RaSCSI, SCSI2SD... there's plenty of these projects recently. All have pro's and con's so consider them thoroughly

I have a couple of SCSI2SD v6s in my Indy and Alphastation, and they work well. I'll have to give one of these BlueSCSIs a try. The SCSI2SD got much faster in v6, as the earlier ones were pretty slow.

The combination of these kinds of SCSI emulators and cards like the XT-IDE really make vintage computers available to more people.

> Currently the final versions in the hands authorized sellers

"Authorized sellers" is redundant. In a free market, everyone is authorized to sell every legal good at all times. I think the author meant "licensed manufacturers".

Not sure I understand what/how this does. Did see "the USB port is not usable for file transfer. Maybe in the future."

Maybe it's because I am mac-unfamiliar mostly?

I have an old Hard-Drive with an ultra-wide scsi cable that I want to get data off of one day - but have not seen an ulra-wide-scsi to USB cable anywhere..

Pretty sure I have some old scss pci cards around and pentium 1(?) / sdram / agp boards / boxes, but little motivation to delve into that pile of stuff that may or may not work.

If this thing could adapt the U-W-scsi drive arrays I have, I'd buy it immediately, but I'm thinking it doesn't, although maybe in the future?

Wouldn't a SCSI <--> SATA device be much more performant and useful ?

Which is to say, one would attach a 2.5" SSD as the SATA device rather than a SD device ...

I have such an adaptor:

http://www.acard.com/index.files/Page613.htm

... although I am not sure if they are produced anymore.

I am also not sure if there is any point at all in discussing the relative speeds of SD vs. SSD when the bottleneck at the end is 50pin SCSI ...

> Wouldn't a SCSI <--> SATA device be much more performant and useful ?

No. BlueSCSI and other SCSI device emulators are intended for use with SCSI-1 (narrow) and SCSI-2 (fast) controllers, maybe even Wide SCSI-2 (fast wide) for some, so the maximum bandwidth here is 5, 10 and 20 MB/s, respectively. Secure Digital is a pretty good match for bandwidth and in many if not most cases saturates the bus. Even if you had a SCSI to NMVe SSD adapter, it would never perform faster than the old bus it's running off.

> I am also not sure if there is any point at all in discussing the relative speeds of SD vs. SSD when the bottleneck at the end is 50pin SCSI ...

Sometimes the bottleneck is the CPU. In some popular vintage classic machines, on a very good day, the bandwidth of the RAM is almost 15MB/s.

AFAIK no old Mac will do 5MB/s on its built-in, external SCSI.

That's the maximum bandwidth for narrow SCSI-1, used in anything from Mac Plus to 68030 machines. The external SCSI, a separate bus, is always SCSI-1. Sometimes the internal SCSI is SCSI-2 (some 68040 & PPC Macs). WGS95 had a wide SCSI card (so had 3 separate SCSI busses, narrow, fast, and fast wide).

Reportedly, with any of the SCSI emulators, it is not difficult to saturate a narrow SCSI bus with a 68030 Mac, so... it will do exactly 5MB/s on narrow SCSI in these cases.

A followup:

It turns out the devices I have are this one:

Addonics ADSALVD160

... which I believe are no longer in production. It is LVD160 on one side and SATA on the other. It has a floppy-sized molex power connector on the board.

I believe your insinuation to be factual, that you can use that adapter to connect a standard SATA drive to a scsi bus, since ultra160 is backwards compatible. But whatever the bandwidth of the bus your converting down to, depending on processor speed, that will be the bandwidth you see, so it's still down to what was available on logic boards and NuBus cards, only narrow, fast and fast wide scsi, topping out at 20MB/s (unless there is an Ultra SCSI NuBus card out there for 40MB/s). Your adapter would be pretty useful for later vintage PCI machines, because you can probably find an Ultra160 PCI card.

Used one in a Mac Quadra recently. Works well. Much cheaper than the alternatives too.

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