The BBC Micro was the machine that really got me hooked. The Sinclair Spectrum was the gateway micro, but it was the Beeb that got programming into my veins. So much so, indeed, that not long ago I finally gave into temptation and bought a BBC Master Turbo on eBay. It didn’t last long. Although fully refurbished, any machine of that… Read more »
[Eagle vs KiCad part 4] In the last post in my Eagle vs KiCad series I’d got as far as using Eagle to place all the components for the HexMonitor project in a schematic. Now it’s time to join them together. Even before I begin, something tells me that perhaps this is too ambitious a project for my very first PCB…. Read more »
Not all foam is created equal. Let me explain. When you buy integrated circuits (ICs, or chips, if you prefer) they’ll sometimes be delivered with their cute little legs stuffed into black foam. That’s because many chips, and particularly CMOS-based ones, are rather sensitive to static electricity. If a static potential builds up between the legs (and if, like me,… Read more »
I’ve wanted an Altair 8800 for a long time now. It’s not that you can do much with it. But it is such an important part of computing history. Famously, the January 1975 edition of Popular Electronics featured the Altair 8800. Or rather, it featured a non-working prototype. The first working machine had gone missing in the post. The magazine… Read more »
A while back I wrote (here and here) about how I’d bought some old Russian memory. It’s a single memory plane from a Saratov-2 (Саратов-2), a Soviet-era Russian clone of the PDP-8 built in the 1960s. Well, I’ve finally given it the home it deserves. I’ve mounted the memory inside a deep frame and put a ribbon of LEDs around the… Read more »
[Eagle vs KiCad part 3] In the last post, I’d got as far as putting all the parts for my HexMonitor project into the schematic, albeit without actually connecting them. There was a good reason for that: while I (somewhat surprisingly) found the connector part I needed in Eagle’s default libraries, it wasn’t labelled the way I wanted. This was… Read more »
[Eagle vs KiCad part 2] Okay, so it’s time to start on the road of deciding whether I want to design PCBs in Eagle or KiCad. I’ve already talked about this a little, but here’s where I’m at. My natural inclination is towards KiCad. It’s open and it has none of the restrictions of the free version of Eagle (and… Read more »
Some mechanical keyboard enthusiasts talk about the ‘end game’ – finally reaching the perfect combination of layout, switches and key caps. Others say you never get there – that there is always another keycap set to buy, always another switch you haven’t tried, always a layout you hadn’t considered. I don’t care about any of that crap. I just want… Read more »
Well that’s two hours of my life I’m never getting back. You know how sometimes you try to do a simple five-minute job and the damn thing just snowballs…? Well that was today. First a quick summary so you know what this is about – I was having problems with apt-get stalling when trying to use it on a Raspberry… Read more »
So I have MicroPython installed on an Adafruit Huzzah ESP8266 dev board. The next step is to get it to run something. MicroPython establishes a basic filesystem using the board’s flash memory. This is handy for storing configuration and data files. And it supports a directory structure. But there are two files in particular you need to get to grips… Read more »
Some time ago I witnessed people getting all kinds of excited about ESP8266 devices. Worth checking out, I thought, and promptly ordered about five boards – specifically the ESP8266 Huzzah boards from Adafruit. They’re not the cheapest, but with Adafruit you always know you’re getting quality and it has features like level-shifted (ie, 5V safe) RX pin and 3V3 output…. Read more »