Super Jamie

I recently read about MicroBee Z80-based microcomputers being remade with modern features like SD Card, ethernet and dual processors.

For the home hobbyist, it appears microcomputing has never died. I had a friend who used to make all sorts of things with PICAXE controllers and of course these days there's Arduino which has a large following.

For those who want something less "embedded system" and more "conventional computer", the home-made Maximite seems to have become the de-facto standard with several SoC clones available. This little thing runs a BASIC interpreter on a 32-bit 80MHz CPU and also has USB, host serial, PS2 keyboard, VGA out and SD Card storage.

All these little things amaze me. They sound so cool and seem to have a world of nostalgia in store. I've always wanted to get one except I had nothing to actually *do* with it.


Lately, a workmate came across someone who had the ThinkGeek Binary Clock on their desk. I love the idea of binary clocks but the "Binary Coded Decimal" of the ThinkGeek clock is stupid. I prefer "True Binary" like this guy's clock which he hacked into the middle of an old hard drive.

So, sometime in the next year or two I hope to make a binary clock which is powered by either USB or PoE, and uses its host power to communicate to an NTP server. Libraries and interfaces exist for the Arduino to do all this, the rest is just me learning to code and putting it all together.


Do any of you guys play around with old micro/embedded computers like these?