Encore un gigatron, this one from Cologne

A place to eternalise your Gigatron build photos. From box to BASIC.
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Use this forum to show off your build photos. For build issues, please consult the directions in the sticky post on top instead.
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frabuk
Posts: 9
Joined: 06 Mar 2020, 21:16

Encore un gigatron, this one from Cologne

Post by frabuk »

Hello,

before I built the kit I could not understand why everybody is so enthusiastic about the manual. But it is really nice! Awesome work, thank you so much! The manual and advice is spot on!

If anyone wants to build the kit, heed the advice about the wattage of the soldering iron. I did the kit with a 30 Watt iron, and some of the ground PINs were a bit tricky. Unfortunately I do not own a 40-60 Watt iron. So I used an 80 Watt one on the more tricky PINs and touched them only for a very brief time. I was worried about overheating one of the ICs. That worked quite well.

The Display in the image is damaged. I‘m waiting on a replacement. The kit itself works perfectly and was tons of fun to built!

Dank je wel!
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jbailey
Posts: 28
Joined: 20 Nov 2018, 08:54

Re: Encore un gigatron, this one from Cologne

Post by jbailey »

Nice looking job, enjoy its a fun computer to play with. Now we have a assembler to make software using the vCPU instructions, let the fun begin.
frabuk
Posts: 9
Joined: 06 Mar 2020, 21:16

Re: Encore un gigatron, this one from Cologne

Post by frabuk »

I was wondering, is there a list of all the test points. I used CLK1 during the assembly. There is one labeled A15 and one ALU7. Can I look these up, somewhere?
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marcelk
Posts: 488
Joined: 13 May 2018, 08:26

Re: Encore un gigatron, this one from Cologne

Post by marcelk »

They are all covered in the FAQ :D. In short:

A15 is a breakout for expanding the RAM. There is a thread on that here: Double your RAM

You can use CLK2 and ALU7 to make eye diagrams when overclocking:

Eye-74HCT-version.png
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Hope that helps!
at67
Posts: 639
Joined: 14 May 2018, 08:29

Re: Encore un gigatron, this one from Cologne

Post by at67 »

jbailey wrote: 10 Apr 2020, 04:40 Now we have a assembler to make software using the vCPU instructions, let the fun begin.
Just a slight correction:

There has been a vCPU and Native Assembler available since the middle of 2018, it's how applications such as Bricks, Frogstroll, Tetronis and Maze were generated.
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marcelk
Posts: 488
Joined: 13 May 2018, 08:26

Re: Encore un gigatron, this one from Cologne

Post by marcelk »

Welcome back! And your assembler is also covered by the FAQ. Documentation wise the project seems near completion.
at67
Posts: 639
Joined: 14 May 2018, 08:29

Re: Encore un gigatron, this one from Cologne

Post by at67 »

I never really left, always lurking :)
frabuk
Posts: 9
Joined: 06 Mar 2020, 21:16

Re: Encore un gigatron, this one from Cologne

Post by frabuk »

This a lot of fun! I dusted of my old arduino Uno and managed to load some software onto the machine. I also compiled at67's great emulator!

My initial plan was to mount a semi-transparent lcd into the box, hang the gigatron on the wall and have it render the mandelbrot set and show me what time it is. And basically be done with it. This was because I thougth you could not really do anything with it unless you had an eprom programmer. Now that I realised that it is fairly easy to get code running on the machine it feels like a very fascinating rabbit hole ...

Maybe instead of hanging it on the wall I'll build a stand that can hold an arduino, a raspberry pi and an USB Hub underneath it. That way the gigatron can be a mandelbrot clock and i can also ssh into the pi and upload code when I have a nice idea for a gigatron program.

Alas, time is a constraint ;-) If I come up with a nice hacking project I will report back in another thread.

Happy Easter to Everyone!
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