BeanPort: a Raspberry Pi Pico-based USB bridge for 8-bit homebrew retrocomputers

Revising my BeanBoardSPI taught me a lot about SPI operating modes and their timing nuances, helping me untangle my SPI puzzle

BeanDeck is a self-contained Z80 computer with mechanical keyboard, 800x480 graphic / 100x30 character colour display, removable flash cartridge storage and GPIOs. Built around the BeanZee single-boar...

BBC BASIC running on BeanDeck can SAVE and LOAD programs to persistent flash storage. Power off, power on, load the program, run it. BeanDeck now feels like a real standalone personal computer!

Writing a driver for flash memory was high on my list. The BeanBoardSPI board has six SPI sockets and I have some Adafruit W25Q SPI flash memory modules, but no firmware for them. That has now chan…

Z80 RA8875 TFT display driver library. Contribute to PainfulDiodes/ra8875-z80 development by creating an account on GitHub.

A pretty naive use of USB power has caught up with me

A lot has happened since Marvin 1.2. I’ve added a hardware SPI interface board (BeanBoardSPI) and through that an RA8875 TFT display. This mostly completes the stack I’m calling “…

My previous hardware SPI post ended with components on order and a PCB layout in progress. This post picks up from PCB assembly, first tests with the RA8875 TFT display controller, and a frustratin…

The missing piece for my BeanDeck standalone Z80 personal computer is persistent storage – I’m going to need somewhere to store programs and data – to load into my 32KB of RAM.

When I started dabbling in 8-bit electronics a couple of years ago, it wasn’t long before I remembered my teenage dream of building a Z80 computer. A computer with a real keyboard, a graphic …