This post has been a long time in the making. I’ve been distracted by various things: work, family, and CNC related projects. I will create a short post describing my first successfully completed CNC project after this one, since I’m pretty proud of it. But onto the topic at hand. The road to a video display began with a stand-alone breadboard… Read more »
The machine-code monitor for my MINI000 68000 SBC is coming along nicely. It’s been great fun and an excellent introduction to writing 68000 assembly. Command processing consists of the following steps: Read a line of text from the serial port. Parse the line into command and argument portions. Locate the command from the set available. This will result in a… Read more »
There are more than a few different choices of C library for running on small systems. Some candidate C libraries for the MINI000 board include: Newlib is an extremely popular choice for small systems. It is relatively complete. Not quite complete enough for a modern desktop Unix system, but almost. It specifically targets bare-bones (AKA freestanding) 68K systems, and allows… Read more »
I’ve been focusing back on the 68000 SBC for the last few weeks. I’m my previous post I mentioned that I’d had no problems with the MAX232 (PDF) portion of the board. As it turned out, this was not strictly true. It seemed that after the board was powered on for a few hours the XR88C681 (PDF) DUART would send… Read more »
This post has nothing to do with my hobbies. It is a rant about the modern state of Apple’s Mac products. If this does not interest you then feel free to ignore this post. I’ve been an Apple Mac fan since 2005, when I bought my first, an iBook G4. This machine was far ahead of the laptop PCs of… Read more »
The MPCNC is now ready to be used in anger. It took longer then I’d have liked but it’s all ready for serious cutting, albeit in wood: Making the spoil-board up was a bit of a mission, mostly because I’m completely new to this kind of thing. I started with a 600mm by 1220mm by 18mm thick piece of MDF…. Read more »
Working on the MPCNC has been a bit of a background project. It’s hard to believe I started printing the parts for it about four months ago. Here is a little about the MPCNC for some context. The project is the brainchild of “Ryan” at v1engineering.com. It is a set of 3D printable part designs, given away freely, and other… Read more »
Five MINI000 boards arrived just after Christmas. Annoyingly I got stung for the import duty, but fair enough. They were still very cheap! The quality looks fantastic, though its hard to tell from a camera-phone shot: The following was done over the course of a few weeks. Unlike the MAXI09 board bringup, I took my time and found I enjoyed… Read more »
I have decided to be a little brave and have opted to build a 68000 SBC instead of one based off a 68008. Specification wise it is similar to the 68020 design: 68000 clocked at 16MHz 1MB static RAM (2 x AS6C4008 (PDF)) 64KB EEPROM (2 x AT28C256 (PDF)) DUART (XR88C681 or, in its place, a SC2681 (PDF))) Expansion connector… Read more »
After writing about building a 68020 computer I feel slightly silly for going back on my word: I have built up a 68008-based computer on breadboard. For one thing going right to a 68020 felt a bit like I’d be missing out; the pleasure is in exploring not the end result. I’d have left out on the other MPUs in… Read more »