Articles about electronics projects, construction ideas, and practical notes about building electronic equipment.
Portable Power
Tue, 07/20/2010 - 22:13 — nathan
My phone, like many modern "smart-phones" has a tendency to go flat when used heavily for internet browsing etc. Unfortunately this is exactly when you aren't near power to charge it up with, so when I found some old iPod replacement batteries in the local Maplin an idea occurred to me. The idea is fairly simple, put a large capacity battery intended as a replacement for the now almost extinct 1st or 2nd gen iPod into a box with a charging socket to charge it, and a power output so it could charge something else.
Spectrum re-fit
Sat, 06/26/2010 - 19:49 — nathan
Last week I was at the UK's first Vintage Computing Festival and picked up a new keyboard membrane for my ZX Spectrum and a replacement metal cover as the one that was on the speccy when I got it was a bit corroded. I took the opportunity to do another couple of jobs on the old computer.
It's been a (very) long time since the last update to this project. I've been busy on loads of new stuff for the project. The system is now capable of booting a binary from SD card or USB memory stick formatted in either FAT16 or FAT32. There's also full PS/2 keyboard support, a much more sophisticated interrupt control mechanism and a VGA display now.
A couple of minor updates you might be interested in. I got a quick demo echoing characters back to the PC working last week. This uses the interrupt on receive feature of the UART setup to trigger a send routine as soon as a character is received. The demo code is available on the Z80 Project page.
I left my Z80 project behind when I went to see family over Christmas, I did do a tiny bit of coding while I was on holiday but not much. Back in snowy Bath this weekend I got some more done on the project. I've spent a lot of time on the documentation. The main reason for this is the fact that I keep doing bits then not looking at it for a couple of weeks and I forget where I was and what changes I'd made.
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