CosmosEx 3.0

Latest update: 15.01.2021

Dear all fans of the CosmosEx devices by Jookie:

Due to some issues Jookie was having, we, atari.sk team, have decided to produce CosmoEx devices under our wings. First batch will be 100 pcs. We have also redesigned the device little bit 🙂 to be more comfortable for use.

Preliminary price is 160 EUR + postage fee.

The price covers: Complete CosmosEx 3.0 device with integrated Raspberry Pi3 model B+, pre-configured Raspberry micro SD card, external 16GB microSD card to get you started 🙂 and the IKDB injector.

For ACSI connection you can use an external or internal cable. We will provide Lotharek cable in package .

For SCSI connection we will try to prepare an internal connection board with cable for the Falcon030, but there will be some soldering on the Falcon motherboard needed so this will not be the best solution for inexperienced users.

For SCSI connection in the TT you don’t need anything special 🙂

CosmosEx 3.0 device is both SCSI and ACSI compatible. More details will be put on this page 🙂

Device will be sold only as a private sell for those who will pay in advance to our account. After we fill the list for 100 units we start the production and we start to deliver first units after approx. 60 days of the production start .

In the near future we will prepare also external case model for 3D printers for free download .

For more information please read whole article !

Some photos of our prototype:

3.4.2018

We have started testing of the prototype and preparing its internal case 🙂

4.4.2018

We have created a special email for ordering of the unit.

cosmosex[@]atari.sk

 

10.4.2018

New case prototype

17.4.2018

100pcs of RPI3B+ SD cards are on the way to us 🙂

18.4.2018

Dear Atari friends from 20.4.2018 we are starting the ordering process. For clarification let us explain some of the things you may be interested in:

1, Price includes: ready to use device in its internal case; external pre-formatted microSD card with some files; IKBD (keyboard) injector; Falcon SCSI internal kit

2, No variations (like to remove RPI or SD cards) are possible, because we can only guarantee full functionality when we build the device (every one will get tested).

3, The case you see on our pictures is only a prototype. In the near future you will be able to download an STL file for your 3D printer and print the external housing in ST style + manual to build external CosmosEx. In this housing you are going to use an external power supply along with the CosmosEx 3.0 and you will get external Cosmos without floppy emulation (except if you decide to build another cable ).

4, This is a private sale  !

Now to the ordering procedure :

You send us an email after 20.4.2018 only with this main information :

Name, Surname

Shipping address (Street, ZIP, City, Country)

Nick name

Number of CosmosEx’es you want to order

After that procedure your NICK will be published in the list on this page and you will get a confirmation mail with bank transfer information (IBAN, SWIFT and name of the account). Please set the bank fees to be paid on the sender side (i.e. you).

After you transfer 160 EUR + postage fees your name stays on the list, otherwise your name will be erased and the place freed for another customer.

Postage fees  :

SK,CZ – 10 EUR

EU,Russia, Ukraine – 20 EUR

US,Canada, Australia – 25 EUR

29.4.2018 

Sorry for the delay with confirming emails but we are too busy 🙁

But first deliveries have arrived 🙂 so here some pictures …

21.5.2018

  • Finished design of the internal SCSI Falcon adapter
  • Finished design of the main CosmosEx 3.0 PCB
  • Ordered electronic parts for the manufacturer
  • Ordered boards production

11.6.2018

Sorry for our long response times in email communication but there’s so much work to do. 🙂

We have decided to provide you Lotharek’s ACSI cable for each order so are going to get SCSI cable and ACSI cable for the same price. 🙂

25.7.2018

We have received a batch of displays for the CosmosEx. We have been working on formatting and preparing 100 internal and external SD cards which are going to be used in the device.

As there are many questions about payments: please follow the simple procedure we have been telling to everyone – when doing a wire transfer, don’t forget to put your nick name and/or position as published on the list on the bottom of this page to the message for the recipient! That ensures that we will pair your payment and mark you as ‚paid‘ in the list. 

Otherwise you are not only putting yourself at risk of being not identified properly but when trying to identify you you are also wasting our time we could use otherwise (like preparing the devices for you).

We’re updating the list as quickly as time permits, usually every Friday on our Atari meeting. 🙂

Thank you all for your support and patience.

27.8.2018

We are back again! Due to summer holidays progress is not as fast as we would wish. As there is still some confusion about who/when/how, here’s a short bucket list:

1, Realization team: there have been many questions about the project structure and responsibilities. So to clear things up, yes, we do exist. 🙂 When it comes to CE 3.0 production, the atari.sk team’s roles are: Jookie – main hardware and software developer, Mikro – consultant and and additional software development, Expi – sales, support, production and „sponsorship“, Xi – consultant and PR 🙂

2, Pre-Production phase: since the beginning it has been decided to build 100 units on pre-order, first come/first serve basis. That way we are sure the devices are going to be produced, payed and appreciated, i.e. it’s a win-win situation. That also explains why you can’t use Paypal: this popular although evil service (ask Exxos!) doesn’t allow us such business model (we all remember the fun with SatanDisk/UltraSatan sales, don’t we?)

3, Production phase: we start to develop and create new features for our new CosmosEx. In fact, we are going to produce 110 units. Why you ask? Well because we also love the CE 3.0 and want a few pieces for ourselves – most likely there wont be a second batch so this production run is the only way to acquire them. The production phase is going to be (actually, some parts already are) paid from Expi’s pocket and later funded from the funds collected to assure as smooth production flow as possible. That means that 110 units are going to be produced in every case (even if the goal of all 100 paid buyers hasn’t been met but read on bellow).

4, Delivery phase and after sale support: if everything goes well, the first deliveries start in November 2018. Naturally, we will deliver only to those which have payed the 180 EUR to our account. After the delivery we will have some spare CosmosEx 3.0 devices in stock but because the investment for this production is covered by Expi he will keep all the remaining CosmosEx devices. And you can be pretty sure that if/when he decides to sell them, it wont be a discounted price, on the contrary, most likely the devices will go to eBay for significantly higher price. After sales support will run on atari.sk at Facebook, and we will try clarify your questions every Friday on our Atari session. 🙂

5, Ordering period : Because many people don’t realise how tiresome is replying to simple emails like „when it’s going to be done“, „is there a way to have it for a cheaper price“ etc even though 90% of the answers is on this page (and most frustratingly, then not going for an order), we have decided to take a more radical approach. Those from the list who will not pay until 15.9.2018 are going to be removed from the list . We accept new orders until the end of September 2018 and last payments until 15.10.2018 . After this date it wont be possible to order CosmosEx 3.0 from us. When/if we will have something on stock, we will inform you in the future about new price and ordering procedure.

6, Copyright : CosmosEx is from the 3.0 version a product of the atari.sk community. Its author is Jookie but the rights belong to atari.sk so please don’t bother Jookie with questions, ordering or requests, use the atari.sk  support email to get answers to your questions. Also we ask you to be patient because nobody from our community has income from this, everything we get from our project is returned back to the ATARI community one way or another.

7, Official support: info[@]atari.sk and cosmosex[@]atari.sk or find us on Facebook as Atari SK …

How do you like our experimental external 3D printed cases? 🙂 crap when you print in lowest resolution 🙁

26.9.2018

Dear all, so now we are waiting for PCB’s and Cases to start the mounting and testing. All RPi’s are tested with our system, all SD card’s are loaded with software, we integrated some passive cooling on RPi’s and probably we also give there a passive cooling on the main chip on CosmosEx board.

For the people who are on the list, please do the wire transfer ASAP, all red nicks will be exchanged for people on waiting list down bellow . 

27.9.2018

Today we received bunch of PCB’s 🙂 🙂 🙂

30.11.2018

Dear Cosmos fans, due to some personal issues as work, family, sickness and so on, we couldn’t update this page as much as we’d hoped 🙁 Sorry for that, I hope everybody can understand that …

So in a few days we are going to delete all people who are not green and fill their places with guys from the waiting list …

About the project, we have everything except the main chips. Our delivery company (TME) says they will be delivered until 20.12.2018, then we have vacations so the mounting company will follow after 7.1.2019.

Now the most optimistic prediction for shipping is the end of January 2019 when we hope to ship first tested pieces …

After some testing of the prototype we have added passive cooling on the RPi. Jookie is now working on floppy write and SCSI issues …

2.2.2019

So TME (delivery company for the main chips) is a little bit late with delivery, according to information from yesterday they have only 70% of our order ready …

During testing we have found out that the new RPi can become very hot so we have decided to add a passive cooling … Now every RPi is tested with the system SD and cooled. 🙂

Jookie  is preparing the floppy write for the units so due to the delivery delay he has some time to work on it 🙂

15.04.2019

Dear friends, sorry for the two months without any information … We are too late with some steps, except other reasons one being my disease on the lungs. 🙁 Now I´m on 80% fit so we continue. 🙂

We fixed the case, because the old one has been only measured for mounting into the ST models. Now you will have two positions to mount it, the Falcon version should fit without any problem (some users have reported that the old units are approx. 8-10mm inside the case 🙁 ).

So for your information, we have now all the main components in stock. We stopped the ordering procedure so everybody who has ordered and payed until now has his Cosmos secured. It takes too much time to solve order misunderstandings so everybody who is GREEN will get his Cosmos in the summer of 2019, everybody else will need to wait until we finish the production . Then we will summarise the current state and we will see what to do next … 

Our soldering company (Elpro) has some government order so they start to produce our boards by the end of May 2019, with the planned production span of 2 weeks …

As soon as the boards will have been assembled, we start on our weekly local Atari meetup completing the units, test them and ship them (our goal is 5-10 units in one week). The shipping will be performed by the Slovak post. The shipping algorithm will be the classic first in – first out, so who payed first will be on the top of the shipping list . Don’t confuse the number on the payee list with shipping position.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

10.05.2019

We received 4 payments. Two of them was actualised on the list (77 and 98). But other two we can not identify! So please, if you sent us money and your name is not green on the list, write us your account number from which you sent us money.

14.06.2019

Quick news: PCB boards are in our soldering company (Elpro).

06.09.2019

Another quick news: we are still alive and you money are still going to be used for your CosmosEx devices. 😉 After „pleasant“ two hours at the soldering company we have been told that September is the month they are going to start soldering all 130 boards for us. Yes, we had been told statements like this before so we can only hope that this time it is for real.

Another news is we have been working on the 3D printer model for both the ST and Falcon (there are slight differences), photos to follow hopefully this week.

15.9.2019

So here is the new internal box, from tomorrow onward we start printing it in our „farm“. You get a gray color case in the delivery but you can also download the STL files and print your own color 🙂 . There will be also available an external STE-like version and finally, a version which allows you to fit CosmosEx + power supply in one „box“.

The samples shown above on the photos is on low quality (print time 3h per piece), the final product will be on finest quality (print time 12h per piece). We definitely pass the installation screw position because you have another position in STE and another in FALCON or TT …

LINK for download :  https://www.dropbox.com/s/cqoyilpcjwftxoo/printed_box.rar?dl=0

27.11.2019

A MIRACLE HAS HAPPENED !!!

Finally we have the whole lot of 130 mainboards, so we start to assembly the week after Silly Venture 2019. So most of you will have nice christmas 🙂 🙂 🙂

21.12.2019

So the miracle was only temporary 🙂 The boards have soldered the RPI connector on the wrong side, we had to let the company to repair it, now it is on good side :)))) While being at Silly Venture we were considering CE 3.0 as a donation for the compos but we have find out that the update / ACSI-SCSI switching process isn’t exactly straightforward and maybe even buggy. So instead of shipping 100 devices and then replying to 100 emails we have decided to investigate the situation instead. Most like it is just a software problem but you never know…

It’s holiday season, so we do our best but our families are the priority n.1. We also prepared the power supply solution for external case and finalised the SCSI boards for Falcon – they are now in production …. 

Our apologies for missing your Christmas but we prefer to be late than shipping defective products. 🙂

In case there will be more issues with the Falcon SCSI boards (or something else), we will ship all CE units anyway – and make another shipping batch later, so you can at least play with your CE on the ST or use an external SCSI cable on the Falcon.

So from our team I wish you Merry Christmas and all the best to new year 2020 🙂

21.01.2020

Just a quick update – we are still trying to figure out what’s wrong with the SCSI setup, discovered at Silly Venture. Basically some CE devices refuse to work properly, the Franz chip reports its version as 0000 and resets every 15 seconds. But when Jookie had a chance to look at it, everything worked as it should. So it’s a bit of mystery whether it is our SCSI cable grounding or something fishier is going on. Hardware-wise, all devices seem to be OK and are basically ready to flash and ship but we wanted to take a look at this issue first.

24.01.2020

So another quick update, for our luck nothing is bad on Franz chip on Cosmos, and after so many tests we find you that on some display modules has wrong description of pins so we need to swap data+ and data – and the main cable for floppy drive needs to be done correctly ! In short, Atari ST sersies used DD drive connection diagram and Falcon used the HD drive connection scheme of the floppy . And we find out that when you connect Cosmos on Falcon via SCSI and Floppy cable witch was exchanged wrong way (the ST way 🙂 ) will cause Franz chip to restart every 15s . We find out after 4th falcon witch was in Factory condition without any „upgrades“ but in this time we test the original Falcon PSU and ATX external PSU and we test also CT60,CT63 and CT60e config 🙂

18.02.2020

Okay, after the „floppy cable mystery“ has been solved we had some internal discussion how to deal with the fact that all Falcons use HD floppy drive and therefore CosmosEx expect the cable to be twisted around. What is fine if you plan to use CE externally (you would need to solve the length of the cable by yourself) but not if you just want to replace the floppy drive by CE in your Falcon. One option would be to produce some kind of PCB which would be connected on the CE floppy socket and revert the signals but that would again (again!!!) prolong the shipping date (we are still waiting for the internal SCSI PCBs, by the way).

Fortunately, we are not alone with this problem – Gotek has exactly the opposite issue on ST/STE machines – they expect a DD floppy drive but Gotek is, by its design, a HD floppy drive emulator. So other clever people came up with a solution like this: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Retro-Atari-ST-Floppy-Power-Data-Cable-Extender-29cm-for-Gotek-Drive-Mounting-/123623525932. No need to (de)solder anything, just plug&play and your floppy cable is long enough to twist.

So all Falcon owners who purchased a CE unit for internal use and are afraid to desolder the original floppy cable, should buy or make something like the one above before your CE arrives. You are going to need it.

In other news, we are soldering wires to the displays (4 wires), buttons (2 wires) and switches (two wires) like crazy. It sounds easy but one has to buy a ribbon cable, separate 4/2/2 pairs of it, peel, put solder on it, solder on the component and repeat. So for one batch (80-pin ribbon cable) multiply all of the operations by 80. And that is only 20 units. Lotsa fun. Hopefully we will be able to assemble & test the first 20 units this week.

29.02.2020

We had a very productive Atari club yesterday (and today morning). We were working very hard (like in a Chinese manufacture 😉 ) so here is a few photos:

CosmosEx - finishing-putting together Mainboard, RaspberryPi, Display, Switches, Screws, ...

CosmosEx – finalising the units – putting together the main board, Raspberry Pi, display, switches, screws, …

CosmosEx - Preparing boxed after 3D printing

CosmosEx – cleaning up the cases after 3D printing

CosmosEx - Flashing bios, final testing

CosmosEx – Flashing bios, final testing

CosmosEx - IKBD hamburger - Soldering in progress

CosmosEx – IKBD hamburger – soldering in progress

At the end, we finally finished just two devices (for the winners of Silly venture 2019 compos) but we prepared another 40 devices for bios flashing and testing.

Completely built & tested two units for the Silly Venture 2019 winners, ready to ship!

About 40 more to go…

And countless of IKBD injectors waiting to be soldered as well 😉

And of course, there  must be some bad news as well. 😉

First, our initial test with the SCSI board didn’t go so well. Not only that there were some causalities (burned one hole for the resistor array) but even after fixing everything we didn’t managed to get it working. We need to investigate more, the symptom itself is very strange – IDE not booting at all, even if only the SCSI board is present, without CosmosEx.

Another (much more painful) issue is that due to a production error there is an unnecessarily tall stand for the IKBD injector wires (on the right) causing a couple of problems – one is that you can’t even close the lid properly and second that you can’t even even bend the pins because the white plastic is in the way:

For the two to-be-shipped units we basically cut the plastic sockets from the wires and soldered it directly, we fear this will be needed also for the rest of the units… no fun at all.

Again and again we have realised how idealistic we were. 😉 From designing via production to assembly, on every step there is a million smaller or bigger issues. And of course, everything has to be fixed in our spare time while under attack of messages when it’s going to be shipped, because we are so late! 🙂

22.04.2020

Good news, everyone! Even with the COVID-19 situation we have been able to continue with assembly and shipping. 60 CosmosEx units have been assembled, 100 bags with supplemental hardware, too (that’s pretty much all of them and they include one small surprise!) Another 25 units is near the finish, they need on/off switch and one button soldered. As the post office has only limited processing capabilities during these days, we have to ship it in smaller batches:

 

Yesterday Xi made a heroic sacrifice and spent 5 hours soldering the last remaining IKBD sandwiches:

Thank you all for your patience, stay tuned for more positive news! 🙂

PLEASE PUT YOUR NICK OR NUMBER FROM THIS LIST TO BANK TRANSFER’S „MESSAGE FOR RECIPIENT“ !!!

 

Sorry now it is not possible to ship to GREECE and Australia …we try to find a way but it takes time … From 14.5.2020 also US is a problem ….

OK so 10 packages are back and the result is HIGHER POWER (force majeure) so we try send it again in some weeks when hopefully this madnes ends … (Greece,Australia,US)

 

18.6.2020

So we send US and Greece again hope it will come to people ! Australia is still problem to send …..

23.6.2020

Nice video about CosmosEx – https://youtu.be/JMjCRRTZ3NM

Be careful about the power !

30.7.2020

Last 20pcs so on waiting list are 19 people, then they dont pay until 10.8.2020 they will be cut out from list . Now we have lack of DMA cable so the last units will miss this cable …

NEXT BATCH IS IN PREPARATION SO IN FEW WEEKS WE WILL START ORDERING PROCEDURE FOR THEM ALSO BUT FIRST DELIVERY WILL BE 02/2021…..

15.1.2021

So after long COVID time we now ship last units to Australia 🙂 According the local problems with COVID we need to pospone the next batch 🙁

Next batch will be also completly new device with prepared name CosmosEx 4.0 . We preparing 3 versions and I hope until end od 04/2021 we can present you the prices and versions 🙂 🙂 🙂

LIST :

1,  UBE(Sweden)                                   41, ZooLook13(Netherlands)                        

2,  UBE(Sweden)                                   42, Fleef(US)                              

3,  Pavt(Czech)                                       43, Llama(Germany)

4,  Pavt(Czech)                                       44, Klauswolf(Germany)   

5,  Xiny6581(Sweden)                          45, localgh0st(Slovakia)    

6,  Exorcist(Norway)                            46, localgh0st(Slovakia)                

7,  BenW(Sweden)                                47, Chirpa(France)     

8,  NumberOne(France)                      48, Chirpa(France)                      

9,  Retro011i(Germany)                       49, Exorcist(Norway)

10, rostb(Finland)                                50, Schmeeve(US)

11,  JohnC(UK)                                       51, Evil (Sweden)

12, Marss(Lithuania)                          52, GRAY (PL) – sponsoring

13, RinRe99(Austria)                          53, meilon(Germany)

14, NumberOne(France)                    54, Anzac(Portugal)

15, Retro011i(Germany)                     55, StEeLz(Canada)

16, XoXisNoOne(Germany)                56, StEeLz(Canada)

17,  THORN(Germany)                         57, StEeLz(Canada)

18, mciepielski(Poland)                      58, Servus_ignavus

19, YThunder(France)                          59, GRAY (PL) – sponsoring

20,  Skynet(Spain)                                 60, Soulbuster(US)

21, Fleef(US)                                            61, Atarian90(US)

22, ka.rs(Germany)                               62, Marcello(Austria)

23, ka.rs(Germany)                               63, Atarian90(US)

24, DimitrisCrete(Greece)                  64, DoG(Sweden)

25, Trecool(Greece)                              65, Bob!k (CZ)

26, Devander(Netherlands)               66, Krupkaj (CZ)

27, davemacblack(Czech)                  67, ST Graveyard(Belgium)

28, Kajetanb52(Poland)                      68, Atarinside(France)

29, MarinB(Austria)                             69, arf(Germany)

30, nvram(Austria)                              70, Kiwaf(Belgium)

31, Flash(UK)                                           71, Heathwoods(UK)

32, Ramlus (Slovakia)                         72, Soulbuster(US)

33, Almerian(Netherlands)               73, Klauswolf(Germany) 

34, Celleke(Belgium)                            74, Anzac(Portugal)

35, BitMarc(Netherlands)                   75, Anzac(Portugal)

36, Mightor(France)                             76, Anzac(Portugal)

37, ZooLook13(Netherlands)             77, Gurulala(CA)

38, Princo(Australia)                             78, Nagan(France)

39, Brendan(US)                                     79, Daniel (Sweden)

40, Greenious(Sweden)                       80, TheGurb (Netherlands)

81, Japond (Switzerland)                     91, meulenvds(Netherlands)

82, el_pasi(Finland)                                92, meulenvds(Netherlands)

83, Fabrickator(Netherlands)             93, uicr0Bee(Poland)

84, kbdanielg(Sweden)                          94, uicr0Bee(Poland)

85, atari1975 (US)                                     95, Digger(France)

86, Llama(Germany)                                96, Superpator(France)

87, atari1975 (US)                                     97, Sedma(Slovakia)

88, ZooLook13(Netherlands)               98, Gwpt(Australia)

89,  Fenarinarsa(France)                        99, Whiskey(Slovakia)

90,   leech (US)                                           100, kodak80(Australia)

END OF LIST

 

WAITING LIST :

01,   zChris(Sweden)                        14, Tecer(Germany)

02,  RF1911(Italy)                              15, displaced(UK)

03,  StFan74(UK)                                16, Cyberish(France)

04, joaquinferrero(ES)                    17, Richard Shepherd(UK)

05, Shugal                                            18, StevenClements(CA)

06, Greame                                          19, Rob (UK)

07, Telemach (Spain)                       20, Ken S (US)

08, explorer(Spain)

09, LaoMu(Germany)

10, Topo

11, Andrew Smith

12, Maikinoki(France)

13, Talanthalus(US)

 

RED = Not payed yet 

GREEN = Payment received 

BLUE = Marked as send to your adress

PLEASE PUT YOUR NICK OR NUMBER FROM THIS LIST TO BANK TRANSFER’S „MESSAGE FOR RECIPIENT“ !!!

Support :

Here on this link you can download STL files for main case of CosmosEx and on youtube you can find video of how to rebuild it 🙂 https://www.dropbox.com/s/cqoyilpcjwftxoo/printed_box.rar?dl=0 or https://www.dropbox.com/s/wzesxb08hlt1ica/printed_box.zip?dl=0