I write about the past, present, and future of technology across three sites. imapenguin.com explores retro computing and programming fundamentals, milkcrunch.com covers modern software development and engineering culture, and evadot.com examines commercial spaceflight and the new space movement.
Posts
- Iiiiittttt'ssss worrrrrkkkingggg. Iiiiittttt'ssss worrrrrkkkingggg.
- Been having an intermittent problem with my Corsham SD board.
- Been obsessed with James Nestor's book on Breath for the last week or so. Wanted to dive into learning Vue, so here's my simple Breathe app to reset my breath throughout the day.
- Working with these great bi directional signal mux boards from @sparkfun today.
- That’s the best packed and shipped old book I’ve bought in a long time. Bravo random eBay seller.
- Nothing says “easy to read” like a VIC-20 serial program in 40 column mode connecting to a remote BASIC machine. I mean, it takes up almost 2/3 of the screen. Plenty of room ;-) I do have a Commodore 128 with a very good 80 column display, but who wants this stuff to be easy?
- This is turning out even better than I hoped. Three 6502 cluster nodes and their serial multiplexer are now hardware complete + tested on their Commodore 64 controller. Hard part is next: writing software. Is VERY close to cubesat sized so now my brain is whirling about that idea
- I’ve had a working “world’s worst paper tape reader” for a year now. Where does the time go?
- Moving my serial multiplexer hack to a more permanent ish setup. I really dig these gold and black proto boards.
- I want to stack my 6502 cluster nodes to save space. They have standard motherboard mounting holes on all four corners. Thoughts on how to mount them about 5cm apart 3 to 5 boards high? It’s for science so….
- Sometimes the best debugging tool is to just print the values. Found it.
- Who has a primer on sizing pull up and pull down resistors? These work but I just guessed.
- Sticking to first principles wherever I can. Moved my serial multiplexer prototype over to the Corsham KIM-1 clone. Working great and ready to be moved to a more permanent proto board. Maybe someday I’ll learn KiCAD and get this fabbed for realz. 6502 cluster 1 day closer!
- My current build project is getting a little out of control. I’m gonna need a bigger house.
- Everyone but me at my company is at RSA in San Francisco. I was invited but declined. For reasons :)
- Flash, insert, test, remove, and reflash are time-consuming. I picked up this ROM emulator to shorten that test cycle on the 6502 Cluster nodes, probably 10x. Less than a week (probably) from having the whole cluster setup first run. Happy Friday!
- All three 6502 cluster nodes are assembled and tested. Next up is to mount them on something and then devise a way of connecting them together and to a control mode (leaning Commodore 64 for that). Then we can calculate all the things.
- Got all three of these boards, two 6502 single board computers (blue)and a bazillion pin FPGA (green) all set up to be soldered on the bottom here. I’m counting 712 pins to solder this evening.
- Post workout / pre day job shenanigans. More Commodore RS-232 work. Happy Wednesday!
- Shout out to @HansOtten for pointing me in the right direction to get the 68b50 ACIA sorted out on my Corsham KIM-1 clone. The retro community is awesome. Actually could be an interesting choice for the Control Node on my 6502 cluster system. Hmm…