Retro Challenge 2014 – Day 5 – First PCBs Ordered

Hokey cokey, that’s the first 4 printed circuit boards for the RC2014 (Oh, did  tell you I’ve named my homebrew Z80 computer “RC2014”? Pretty catchy name, eh?) ordered with OSHPark.  If they arrive as quick as other boards I’ve had from there before, then I should have 11 days to get everything put together and working!

All 4 boards look fairly similar, being a CPU board, RAM and 2 variation on ROM, but here’s the 32k RAM board;

Screenshot from 2014-07-05 16:02:42

3D Artistic Render

front

Front

rear

 

Rear

Still need to crack on with the rest of the boards

Oh, and remember the actual challenge I set myself?  It was to light up my name in LED lights.  Well, last night I got another step closer with the discovery of a whole bunch of 8 x 8 LED matrix boards at Nottingham Hackspace.  They’re so cute at 20mm x 20mm.

IMG_20140704_200743

Just need to dig out the spec on these and see how I go about interfacing them with the Z80