Amiga iComp Rapid Road

What is going on?

Another expansion in the form of 2 USB ports for the A1200 is shown in this post.
The iComp Rapidroad card plugs into the clock port and takes power from the floppy drive connector.

My ACA1233n has a faster clock port for the job. Without this accelerator the standard clock port is a bit slow for good USB performance, although iComp state that it works perfectly well.

The iComp instructions are a bit older than the 1233n and don't give clear instruction on how to install into the case properly. I'm hoping this post helps anyone else trying the same thing.

So why USB for such an old computer? Well, I thought it would be better for networking and tidier for storage devices.

Installation

First thing to setup was the real time clock from the accelerator card. The clock port on my A1200 has all the pins (not all do) and this was a bit confusing at the start, but then it was clear that the RTC would only fit one way. 

RTC install to motherboard

 This frees up the faster clock port on the ACA1233n.

Clock port on ACA1233n

I tried to install in a tidy way but this is the wrong way to install as the Rapidroad will not allow the case to close

Tidy, but wrong

The correct way seems to be a jaunty angle install from the other side of the card. Yes it looks a bit bad, but this is the only way.

Correct way

I bought this from Amiga Kit with the 3D printed holder.

Neat ports

Connecting up

I bought a couple of cheap devices to try with the Rapidroad. Both successfully worked.

Poseidon USB stack is essential to getting devices working. 

CD and Network adaptors

The key choice for the networking device is the supported chip set. I bought a UGREEN Ethernet Adapter with a AX88772 chip. The performance isn't as great as I hoped, but iBrowse worked and performs well for file transfers.

The CD drive was a cheap device that powers using both USBs, but you can power it from another power source (5v jack) to keep the 2nd port free. Yes, this does work as a CD and it was able to access content from Workbench

A CD