Probably my biggest retro electronics project - a Z80 microprocessor based lighting system. In this video I scope the serial data output of a simple Z80 input controller.
By Julian
Youtuber, shed dweller, solar charge controller aficionado
I never saw VeroWire before, it looks very neat, but I guess you have to be certain about what you are doing, redoing one wire would mess up the beauty for the other wires.
And programmed without RAM! Only using the Z80 internal registers as storage. That's impressive! Of course a big advantage of the Z80 is its shadow registers.. With a bit of creativity, it gives you actually a relatively large amount of storage. And beautifully built as well!
Just watched the video… Boy do it bring back memories !!! I started on the Intel 8008..
Happy to see that somebody used the Zilog PIO for once, always a bit piqued to see retro designs using a 8255
I still have my first computer, an Osborne Executive, which used a z80 processor and came with 128K of RAM in the box. Somewhere I have a board that somebody sent me that would allow you to replace the original memory daughterboard with different parts (people also did this by piggybacking the chips one on top of another) and end up with 512K, which could give you a ramdisk, printer buffer, etc. I've never populated that board. I also have a ton of chips, both in this family and in the 6500-series family, which has its enthusiasts as well, and I used to think fairly regularly that I was going to build some stuff with some of that but somehow never got around to it. These days I'm seeing all the nifty stuff that you're doing with arduino boards, and am thinking about acquiring some of those to play with instead… 🙂
What did you use for the switches?
Far out dude… Nice work
There are no Zed 80s on the boards Julian. They are Zee 80s as it is an American name. 😛 Zilog is the company that designed them even though some of the first ones were made by Mostek because Zilog didn't have a plant ready to make them. You still can find them buried in all sorts of things.
"the z80 became old and unloved" well the z80 was before my time, but my first game console was a gameboy color (got one when all the cool kids had advanceSP), and recently I started developing software and hardware for it, and got kinda obsessed with the z80 (which the gameboy cpu is derived from).
I was surprised to find Zilog actually still makes them in the original form factor (while also having developed z80 based modern microcontrollers w/ internal ram/flash/peripherals/etc, but that's lame, if i want that i could just use an AVR :P), and a bunch of different interesting companies make compatible stuff (e.g. I got a bunch of flash chips that fake the pinout of a parallel SRAM from Samsung of all people 0.o, and pin compatible self refreshing DRAM chips etc; very nice, essentially both are parallel addresses+data+chipselect+clock+writeenable you just stick on a bus and they just work, no ram refreshing or high voltage flashing magic etc required but also no modern fancy but hellish incompatible spi or i2c which means instantly works with the z80 and I don't need strange device specific flashers but can essentially use a gameboy cartridge reader/flasher I built to interface those too). gonna build a computer with it with my own bios and everything BECAUSE I CAN 😀
so don't worry, those jewels are still very loved today. and yes I know I'm crazy 😀
The Z80 is a great processor for the project because arduinos and stamps didn't exist back in the 80s
Ha!
Love it
I am thinking of trying to build a Z80 board as I was a bit young the first time around. Yours looks like quite a project must have been a lot of work. I remember back in the day using the pens to draw the tracks and also those transfers for the IC pads. The joy of covering the table cloth in ferric chloride and accompanying clip around the ear. why your obsession with power banks LOL Regards Chris
Julian, what is the correct spelling of your first name?
That's a neat prototyping method!