Like many people, I had seen wild crazy looking mechanical keyboards, and had been both fascinated and confused by them. How could you get by with so few keys? What does each key actually do? They looked like some kind of wild alien input device, but, at the same time, must work well otherwise the fad would have died out years ago. The high cost and fear of failure, thought, was enough to put me off of trying them out.
While attending OSHCamp earlier this year, a talk by Alan Wood explained a lot of the ideas behind these keyboards, and answered a lot of my questions - except for one; Would I be able to cope adjusting to one?
During the 2021 lockdown I started a laser cutting project I'd wanted to do for a while. It turned out that the research on this went much much deeper than I first expected.
You probably recognise this image, and think you know where it comes from. But what if I told you the story goes back further than you think.
So, you may well remember that I entered Retro Challenge 18 months ago, and what a fun crazy busy time that was! Well, the January Retro Challenge competition is about to kick off in just over 2 weeks. If you're not familiar with Retro Challenge, shame on you! But you can de-shame yourself by heading over to http://www.retrochallenge.org/ and seeing what it's all about. Essentially, it's a month long bi-annual competition where the entrants set themselves a goal based around old school computing and blog, tweet and share their experiences. The goals are pretty loose, as long as they are based on something from last centuary (modern emulators of old kit is fine). The challenge I set myself was to take a breadboard based Z80 computer and bring it to life in modular PCB form in such a way that I could spell out my name on. Have a look back through my blog to see how I did. Spoiler ---->
Recently I've read a few posts about other peoples working environments, office setups, man caves or work benches. I've also had a couple of people ask about mine, since I tweeted about the redecoration and overhaul of my old "spare room" as it transformed in to "Man Cave 2.0". I had intended to write it up when it was finished anyway, although, even now, 9 months later, it is still not finished, I am begining to realise that it will never actually be finished but will evolve and morph over time. So, this is a look at the overall design and some of the finer detail in to my Man Cave 2.0 as it stands in August 2014
Wow! What an awesome month July has been. The whole Retro Challenge thing has been great, and despite moments of stress or despair, I have thoroughly enjoyed taking part and seeing what everyone else has been up to. Before I sum up my project, I should make a few honourable mentions. Retro Challenge - A huge thanks to Mark and Wgoodf do a great job in hosting this twice a year. Keeping everyone updated via Twitter has worked really well. Cheers guys! Grant Searle is responsible for the general Z80 design I used and also converted MS BASIC from the Nascom to run on this. Really, this project is a test of my understanding of Grants work and seeing how far I can take things. Nottingham Hackspace has an amazing "parts bin" that included the LEDs, Veroboard, case, some of the logic chips and the RAM I used. OSHPark did a great job (for a very good price!) on the PCBs - even if the postal system did keep me on the edge of my seat for a bit! Chris Gammell introductions to KiCad PCB design videos were critical in guiding me through the various stages of board design. Rodney Zaks book Programming the Z80 has been like a bible for me. Combined with a few dozen other resources of Z80 info on line I've been able to at least get the basics assembly language programming. CLRHome is a great online Z80 IDE that can compile assembly language in a variety of output formats including for the ZX Spectrum. I doubt I could have managed this in notepad! All of the other Retro Challenge entrants deserve a mention too, but there's a few that really caught my eye and taught me stuff about their particular approach to RC2014, such as Wgoodf - Turtles all the way down, Ians restoration of Northstar Horizon, Tezzas restoration and programming of Challenger 4P, John finishing work on Fahrfall
With over 24 hours to go before the end of July deadline the final piece of the puzzle fell in to place! But, first, a quick catchup from the last blog post;
Despite a late start today, things have gone well so I actually feel like I'm ahead of the game right now. Certainly not finished, but with most of the major hurdles now behind me, the only thing left is writing a bit of Z80 assembler code. And even that is starting to look manageable.
So, exactly 3 weeks after they were ordered, the PCBs from OSHPark arrived today. It's just as well, as I was running low on things to do without them, and with just 6 days left of the Retro Challenge I would have struggled to finish in time. Well, that's my weekend planned out for me now!
