Hi from Brisbane

[Heywood]

Hi,

Lurked on the forum on and off over the years but finally one of my projects is getting legs and I will be wanting show it off soon.

My history was an A500 user back in highschool with various upgrades including a Supra Hard Drive with 20MB HD and 2MB RAM, Top Chip 2Meg Chip RAM Expansion and my favorite Microbotics VXL 30 Accelerator with 8MB RAM, cruising the local BBSs and downloading various demos and evaluation software at 14.4kbps was a formative time for me.

I dont have that any more, however I do have a CD32, A600 and a minimig (as well as some Raspberry Pis that seem to do a reasonable job running games and demos)

Anyways, it's great to see that people are still keeping the torch going!

[chip]

Welcome to the forum Heywood

What about your projects ?

[Orcish75]

Originally Posted by Heywood

Hi,

Lurked on the forum on and off over the years but finally one of my projects is getting legs and I will be wanting show it off soon.

Did you use sandpaper in any of your projects? (Sorry! Couldn't resist!)

Welcome to the forums. Keen to hear about your projects though. Pity you no longer have that A500, was a beast of a machine in it's day.

[Heywood]

Thanks for the welcome chip and Orcish75,

I'm working on building an A600 shell and keyboard with a Raspberry Pi inside it - somewhat similar to what mattsoft over at AmigaLove has done - originally I was doing this with copious amounts of hot glue, however my wife bought me a 3d printer for Christmas and I've been manufacturing brackets and things to hold things together, this seems to keep being a moving target as I shift things about, redesign/reprint things but it's starting to come together. The idea is to be able to upgrade the interior if required and even have the ability to install an A600 motherboard and restore it to its former glory without needing to patch up holes etc (some sanding and filing on the 3d printed parts only )

Originally I was using a Keyrah v2 for the keyboard adapter and while it was okay I didn't like it that much for the following reasons:

1. The size of the thing was a little larger than I prefered (which wasn't huge but it was designed to solve multiple problems and the default USB connector wasnt helpful if I was to direct the joystick ports out the side)
2. The lack of locking connector for the ribbon cable made it seemed non-ZIF
3. Wanting to remap the keys a bit from the default

It looks like the adapter from Tynemouth is probably closer to what I was after but this seemed to be a project I could take on and put my own spin on it.

So I decided to roll my own using a Teensy++ 2.0 and a 30 Pin FPC connector and working with the very cool QMK firmware that a lot of keyboard enthusiasts seem to like.

After playing around with a prototype that had the FPC hanging off one side of the Teensy, I scrawled a PCB design with a few minor changes to the prototype and received PCBs in the mail this week of which I was able to quickly assemble and start to test with a fair level of success - if things work out right I plan to document it a bit more clearly and put the PCB design and firmware up on Github for others to make their own or improve (should they be interested) - I'll make a post in hardware.mods when it's ready for a more proper announcement.

[haps]

Hi from Hervey Bay.

[hansel75]

Hi from Gladstone Qld!

[Heywood]

Queenslanders Represent!