I wanted to put out an update about my various Psion projects. I’ve been away for a while, thanks to some mental health issues culminating in a career change. It’s only in the last week or so that I’ve felt able to look at projects like this again; projects I enjoy but for which I just didn’t have the mental energy.

It’s been an interesting morning. I’ve been digging around in the internals of the Siena SSD drive and made some discoveries.

The Siena SSD drive was released so that the diminutive Siena could still read SSDs. I bought one of these on eBay a week ago because I wanted to answer a question: “How did Psion get the SIBO Serial Protocol to work over RS-232?”

It’s been far too long since my last update on this project. It’s the usual excuse (“I’m sorry, but life just got in the way, blah blah blah.”) and to those of you who are taking an interest in my little WiFi Pack project, not to mention the rest of the efforts of the Last Psion project, I can only apologise. For now, here’s a brief update on what I’ve been up to.

Psion Series 3a with custom green case. I think of it as looking like dragon skin.

Near the end of last year I hit a wall. After spending months trying to learn VHDL and feeling very much like I was failing, I decided to put my participation in the project on hold. I had burnt out and it was time to walk away, if only for a little while.

UPDATE: The latest version of SIBODUMP has just been released along with binaries for Windows and macOS. Take a look here: https://codeberg.org/thelastpsion/sibo-ssd-dump

SIBODUMP and its partner sketch Dump.ino have slowly developed into a very handy toolkit for SSD ripping. In its current form it’s able to dump blocks from any ASIC5-compatible SSD (so that’s all of them). I’ve also started to get it to pull images in native ASIC4 mode - all but the very earliest SSDs have ASIC4, and being able to talk using ASIC4’s registers could open the doors to even more development.