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Today I found in a drawer of my old lab this board, and memory began to go into the past.Was 1996 , 16 years ago this is my first board based on a 16 bit micro controller that used 'C' firmware that i called VR1000 (see on the bottom layer) .

I developed that board for a BUS Fleet Managment application .

That board was based on Siemens 80c166 in future that was the base for ST 10 a father of STM32.

The specification of this board was :

• Microcontroller Siemens 80C166 .
• 20 Mhz oscillator.
• External muxed PROM and RAM (muxed mean that the address and data bus was shared so you need a component that with a pin automatically choose to use address or data bus for parallel comunication with Prom and RAM)
• 64 kbyte EEPROM (Electri Erasable PROM) normaly before every reload of firmware i use UV Lamp for delete the firmware in the EEPROM.
• 32 Kbyte static RAM
• 8 Mbit Intel parallel flash . (Was first Flash available on the market , normally that component need 12 volt for write data in the flash and use 5 volt

With this kind of board was possible to fly a drone 16 years ago but the main problem was the sensor

In this sensor is possible to see the VR1000 (1996) and VR Brain MP32F4 IMU (2012)

VR1000 CPU

80c166 (16 bit micro controller)

VR BRAIN MP32F4

STM32F4 (32 bit micro controller)

VR1000 RAM and PROM

64 Kbyte EEPROM and 32 Kbyte Ram (external)

VR BRAIN MP32F4 RAM and PROM

1 Mbyte Flash and 192 Kbyte Ram

VR1000 vs VR MP32F4 speed of processor

20 mhz vs 168 mhz

Advanced feature available only in MP32F4 :

Internal FPU - DSP floating point processor.

MPU6000 3 gyro 3 acc

I am very curious to know how will the new micro controllers for DIY applications in 2028 :)

Original blog post : http://www.virtualrobotix.com/profiles/blogs/retro-board-vr1000-my-first-advanced-electronic-design/