In this post, I interface a vacuum fluorescent display to the RC2014: Sourcing displays These vacuum fluorescent display modules can be found easily on ebay, just search for “Noritake VFD”. They’re available in a variety of different configurations from single line displays to four line displays. A word of caution about the larger displays — …
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Z80 Retrocomputing 12 – Talking Nixie Tube Clock
In this post, I assemble a bunch of RC2014 boards and make a talking Nixie Tube Clock This project Makes use of the following RC2014 boards: CPU Board Real-time clock board SP0256A-AL2 Speech Synthesizer SIO Board CTC Board Dual RAM/ROM Board Single-stepper board Here’s a diagram of how the boards all work together: I chose …
Read MoreZ80 Power-on reset circuits
If you’ve watched my recent video on the Nixie tube clock, you may have noticed that my clock didn’t have a power-on reset capability. It sat there locked up until someone flipped the reset switch. I spent some time looking over the Internet and came up with two options for reset circuits: Option 1: The …
Read MoreZ80 retrocomputing 11 – CP/M on the RC2014
In this post, I run CP/M on the RC2014 While browsing around Grant Searle’s website looking at his Z80 projects one day, I stumbled upon his CP/M project and it sounded like a great idea to reproduce this on the RC2014. Motivation CP/M is a disk operating system that was popular from the 1970s to …
Read MoreZ80 Retrocomputing 10 – RC2014 CompactFlash board
In this post, I implement a compactflash adapter for the RC2014 If you haven’t read by first blog post on the RC2014, please start there as it will provide background information, including where I purchased the kit from. Purpose If I think back to my first computing experiences, there was usually some form of storage. …
Read MoreNixie Calculator Update – PCB availability, source code, design notes
The nixie tube calculator project was not funded on kickstarter, and I recall some time ago promising to make the boards and other resources that I used for constructing the prototype available. Well, it’s taken a while but I’ve finally got around to it. I’ve made the boards available on Osh Park, which is the …
Read MoreZ80 Retrocomputing 9 – CTC and dual serial ports for RC2014
In this post, I add a Z80 CTC (counter-timer) and SIO/2 (serial IO) to the RC2014 If you haven’t read my other Z80 retrocomputing blog posts yet, then please start with the first one, Intro to Z80 Retrocomputing, for an overview of the RC2014 platform. Motivation All I wanted to do was connect a GPS …
Read MoreZ80 Retrocomputing 8 – Speech Synthesizer for RC2014
I built a speech synthesizer board for the RC2014 The speech synthesizer IC that I chose is the SP0256A-AL2. One of my reasons for choosing it was that it seemed plentiful on eBay. They’re all fakes though, every damn one of them on eBay, so far as I can tell. 🙁 Fortunately, there is a …
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