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;
Retro Challenge – Half-time Catch-up
We’re at the halfway mark of the Retro Challenge, and there’s a slight lull in activity, so this seems like a good chance to catch up on what’s been done so far, and what’s still to come.
Firstly, a quick review of the challenge I set myself; write my name in LED lights. These must, however, be controlled by a Z80 computer, which I’ve got to design and build myself, and written in assembly language which I need to learn.
Well, the start of the challenge saw me dive headlong in to KiCad, learning some of the intricacies of printed circuit board layout. I’d used KiCad for a couple of little projects before, but certainly wouldn’t have described myself as competent. I’m still not a master of it, but I’m a lot more familiar with it than I was.
I split my breadboard based Z80 down in to several modules, each of which will plug in to a Veroboard backplane. 6 of these have been designed and sent off for manufacture which will give me a basic Z80 computer that I can use via a terminal emulator. The boards are;
- CPU
- Eprom (for BASIC eprom)
- Eprom (for my Z80 code)
- RAM
- Clock
- Serial I/O
Retro Challenge – A Glitch In The Matrix
I knew there would be some stumbling blocks with this Retro Challenge, but, hey, it wouldn’t be a challenge if everything was just nice and simple. However, I seem to be beset by little stupid technical issues that aren’t necessarily retro in nature.
However, the fact that you’re reading this does at least mean that my blog is working again! I ran some updates last week, and it caused some issues with a plugin meaning I had no way of adding, editing or modifying any posts. I’ve now got that tracked down to the Poll plugin and disabled it. So, yay, I’m back!
So, part of this challenge is to use LEDs, and the little 8×8 matrix modules I found seem ideal. I had initially intended to design a PCB to mount a bunch of these on, but due to time constraints, it was looking very unlikely I’d get them designed, ordered, manufactured and delivered by the end of the month, let alone time for testing. So I decided to go Old Skool, and do this part on a breadboard. Well, 2 breadboards, as they each need a driver chip. Although, it’s actually 3 breadboards, as 2 aren’t quite big enough. Not to mention the other breadboard with the supporting circuitry on. I made a start on this last night;
- Home Made, Pointless but fun, Retro Challenge, Z80
- blog, electronics, LED, projects, Retro Challenge
Retro Challenge 2014
I have always wanted to enter Retro Challenge, ever since I first heard of it nearly 24 hours ago. I followed a link that took me to http://retrochallenge.net/ and I read up on what it was all about, scrutinised the rules and checked out what others were doing. I quickly came to the conclusion that I could give this a thing a go.
All I needed to do* was come up with a suitable challenge for myself.
I have decided to make my name appear in LED lights.
So an email was sent to the competition organisers; (more…)
