Recent Articles
Happy New Year. Again. And Again. And Again...
A recent discussion started with the simple question "When is it New Year?". Well, 1st January, right? The stroke of midnight on 31st December? Depends where you are on the planet? [depends what planet [if any] you are on]. It depends on which timezone you are in.
So, we settled on it being at the stroke of midnight for each of the timezones around the world. Which, surprisingly, is 30. Less surprisingly, they cover a full 24 hours.
Printing Xmas Tags Like It Was 1983
Yesterday this tweet appeared on my Twitter timeline
[embedTweet url="538666941335236610"]
Now, being the geeky retro Sinclair fanboy I am, I read it, understood it, and retweeted it. Obviously.
RC2014 SD Bootloader Update
Just a quick update to about the SD Bootloader I designed a few posts ago. Well, the PCBs have arrived and last week I took a soldering iron to one of them and gave it a quick test
One side of the board is effectively an Arduino, so without plugging it in to the RC2014, I connected up an FTDI lead and uploaded the Arduino Blink sketch. A quick check with a multimeter and one of the pins was altenating between 5v and 0v. So far, all good!
Chromecast to VGA
When Google first launched the Chromecast, I wanted one as it seemed like it would solve a lot of viewing problems for me. The trouble was, my "TV" (technically, it's a 42" monitor as it has no tuner) doesn't have any HDMI sockets, so it would cause more issues than it would solve, and I figured it would be £30 wasted.
When the price was dropped to £18 recently though, I figured that was within the realms of wasteable money I was prepared to spend. My TV didn't have HDMI, but it did have composite, RGB, SCART and VGA connections. Surely something would work...
RC2014 Bootloader for SD Cards
So, the RC2014 is great. I can run Microsoft BASIC and program it from there, and as long as I am using a terminal emulator, I can copy & paste to save and load programs. Alternatively, I can write Z80 code using an online compiler then download it, copy it to USB stick, move it to my old Windows 2000 laptop (which has a parallel port) so I can burn it on to EPROM to see if it works, make adjustments and repeat with another EPROM.
I will be the first to admit, however, that this is probably not the most efficient workflow. Not to mention the time and effort involved in wiping the limited stock of aged EPROMS.
So, I am in the process of designing an SD Card based bootloader.
RC2014 with ZX Printer interface
My original plan had never been to design and build my own computer. I had, however, planned to build a clone of the Sinclair ZX80, which has been on my bucket list of things to own for year, and which I had found plans for online. Whilst collecting the parts and reading up on simple Z80 computers I got kind of sidetracked and ended up with the RC2014.
The heart of the RC2014 is a Zilog Z80 CPU, which is the same one that Sinclair used in the ZX80, ZX81, ZX Spectrum and Z88. If the ZX81 and ZX Spectrum can run a ZX Printer, then surely it follows that the RC2014 will be able to too?
