Okay, another in a great line of community-built hardware projects: The Mini-Thylacine, 4 port USB controller card for all Zorro II and Zorro III Amigas.

A few years ago, there was a commercial product called the Thylacine card. The design was eventually open-sourced for anyone who wanted to build it. One Amibay user started making production runs in batches of 20 at a time (Ginny Flick).

Eventually, this user started making a miniaturized design that had a single header to attach a standard usb header connector for 4 ports. This was the mini-Thylacine card shown here:

Here are the features:

- full SMD technology;
– dimensions: 130x69mm;
– integrated HUB with 4 ports;
– each port is short-protected and over-load protected;
– fully bug fixed, no a single correction on schematics or PCB;
– max transfer rate is about 380KByte/sec (depends of your CPU power);
– low current consumption (about 160mA) without any device connected to USB ports.

And the ordering thread is located –> here <–. I used the original thylacine that he built a few years ago, and the transfer speed was a bit slow, but it was fully working with the Poseidon USB stack. Ginny_Flick would email the driver after an order had been shipped.

Yet another cool project by clever Amiga users!