28-12-2021, 02:57 PM
Well, construction is complete and was not too tedious, despite the many, many joints to be made on the motherboard and edge connectors. No dry joints or solder bridges to debug, I'm happy to say. After a few checks it fired straight up and was communicating with a terminal emulator on Linux. The only comment I would make is that the documentation is not quite up to date with respect to motherboard jumpers -- these all seem to be linked by traces and would need to be cut, if required, rather than open and needing to be bridged. For example, if you wanted to fit a 7805 regulator and power it from a higher voltage, then you'd need to cut a trace on the board.
I also purchased an ESP8266 card so I don't have to be tethered to it via USB cable/FTDI. Initial setup of this was dead easy. The only snag came when trying to upload Intel hex files to the Small Computer Monitor software. I always got a 'Bad command' error. This was solved by connecting to the ESP8266 using Putty in raw mode to port 23.
So far, so enjoyable, and a real blast from the past.
I also purchased an ESP8266 card so I don't have to be tethered to it via USB cable/FTDI. Initial setup of this was dead easy. The only snag came when trying to upload Intel hex files to the Small Computer Monitor software. I always got a 'Bad command' error. This was solved by connecting to the ESP8266 using Putty in raw mode to port 23.
So far, so enjoyable, and a real blast from the past.
My name is Steve, but I answer to most things like "Oi, you!".
