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Reduce, reuse, recycle!

A project log for 65uino

6502 based learning in a familiar form factor

anders-nielsenAnders Nielsen 07/07/2023 at 18:050 Comments

Of course I intended to get this log in before the end of the "Green hacks" challenge round, but only managed to get the actual board and code changes pushed to Github - I hope the judges noticed. 

From the beginning this project really was meant to inspire you to do the same thing as many of my other projects: Save some nice old chips from the landfills instead of buying a new dev board! 
And when you're done with it and the 6532, 6507, and ROM have found a new place somewhere, you still have a nice 3v3 + 5V voltage regulator that takes dupont or barrel jack input up to 18 volts, in an Arduino form factor - and has a nice little 1 MHz oscillator. 

Not the worlds greatest feat of engineering but I hope it can inspire others to try to use what you have on hand before you buy new - and if you're a maker: To design for the fact that eventually your thing might need to be scrapped responsibly - so make it easy to reuse the parts. 

On the code side there's a few spoilers if you're watching my video series on the 65uino - it has all the 6502  assembly code for showing text on the SSD1306 display as well as the bare minimum for interfacing with the BMP180 barometer and as you might expect from this sort of thing: It also supports loading code through the serial pins "D0" and "D1", at a whopping 4800 baud. 

Speaking of: I updated the silkscreen so you don't need a computer nearby to figure out if you plugged anything in the wrong way - there is the slight confusion that D0-D7 on a 6502 usually refers to the data bus pins, but on an Arduino refers to the "[D]igital pins". 

For good measure I also put the 6532 pin designations on the board - that should lessen the confusion. 
Please note the silkscreen changes aren't in the gerber zip - so if you're sending it off to a manufacturer this week you might want to plot the gerbers yourself instead of the zip file. 

Oh! And I slimmed the board a bit to make sure it fits in the "official" 68.6mm width of an "Arduino" - excluding the USB and cuttoff section of course. 

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