Hello everyone!

I've been designing and coding for my Acolyte 6502 Computer for a while now (most recent topic on that here viewtopic.php?f=4&t=7407).

For as long as I've been designing it, I've had two goals in mind:

1) Use it for video games for Math Appreciation Day (most recent topic on that here viewtopic.php?f=1&t=7585).

2) Use it to help teach high school aged folks the basics of digital electronics. This is the reason for this new topic.

I find that the Ben Eater kits + videos are good, but ultimately I feel that breadboards should not be the final goal. I also feel that it lacks solid human input/output interfaces, particularly *useful* video, easy keyboard, and mass storage capabilities. Some of these are easy to get without Ben's personal help, some he has tried himself but fell short. [ These are my opinions, you can have your own opinions of course. ]

What other kits out there can give you the full home microcomputer experience, while still being understandable and yet useful? Ones that don't give you black box FPGA chips that run 100 times faster than the 6502, or try to hide some critical aspects behind epoxy blobs? What is designed not for experts but interested beginners, yet give them a long lasting product they can be proud of, and "own it" themselves? What is not $300 just to run BASIC?

I am proposing to use the Acolyte as a "solder it yourself" kit (or maybe also a pre-soldered kit?), certainly under $100, coming with a great user manual that doubles as a curriculum of sorts. Videos are also a possibility. And although I am a math teacher, I cannot make digital electronics curriculum to save my life it seems. I need someone who likes writing, someone who would partner with me to get something out there, and perhaps make some money while doing it. Is that person you?

Feel free to post here, or PM me if you'd rather do that. I'm happy to take suggestions as well, even critical.

Thank you everyone.

Chad

It seems there is no interest in that regard. No problems, thank you for reading none-the-less.

Garth, I cannot delete topics, so if you as moderator want to delete this topic, then go ahead. Thank you all!

Chad

I suspect the reason for lack of interest is that 'a bit of writing' is amazingly time consuming - I speak as one who has published a technical book (not in the micro field) and who has had to document complex systems in the past for major (country wide) projects.

Basically, it isn't easy... while the idea appeals, I would not wish to attempt it as I have far too much on my plate at the moment. It's amazing how busy you get once you retire...

I suspect also that people here would rather be working on their own projects - whether development or documentation - than on someone else's.

Neil

My wife is a writer - of sorts - as a celebrant, she has the task of condensing a persons life-story from family meetings and chats into their story to be read out at their funeral and often she has less than a week to do it... It's a great skill, but would it work in a technical environment? I suspect not.

I have written many manuals and documentation in the past for some of my projects too - see

https://unicorn.drogon.net/apricot.pdf

for a recent example... but would I want to write a manual or documentation for someone elses project? Not really - sorry, but if you want the templates, Makefiles, etc. and can use LaTeX then let me know...

Videos - don't need to be hard - they just take time - I use OpenShot as an editor to put together stuff from mobile phone, GoPro and screen recorder.

However - I'd suggest keeping the thread alive and not deleting it - you never know, some people only pop in once a week or 2, so leaving it longer isn't going to hurt.

Good luck,

-Gordon

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--
Gordon Henderson.
See my Ruby 6502 and 65816 SBC projects here: https://projects.drogon.net/ruby/

Never meant to make it just my own project, if they were to partner. That's what partners do, right?

But I understand. If I never asked, I'd have to blame myself for never asking!

Thank you.

Chad

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http://WilsonMinesCo.com/ lots of 6502 resources
The "second front page" is http://wilsonminesco.com/links.html .
What's an additional VIA among friends, anyhow?

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x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

One side point is the question of language. In spite of superficial resemblance, English English (such as I speak and write) is not the same as American English (such as I expect you, and of course your local readers, to speak and write). The differences are often subtle but will give the reader a sense of something being 'wrong' in the way something reads - particularly younger readers will expect a shared context with the writer and find it much easier to handle if it exists.

As an example: I have been learning German from a Duolingo course for a couple of years. A big problem for me is that Duolingo does not use UK English as a base language but rather US English, and the result is that apart from its preference for US spelling and grammar, there are whole chunks of context for which I have no referents - school and university life, for example. I have to translate German to English and English to American

Neil

I might be able to proofread and offer suggestions etc but I don't have any experience in education and due to some personal problems recently I can't really make any serious commitments, it is really unpredictable whether I'll have time to spend on anything hobbywise.

_________________
http://WilsonMinesCo.com/ lots of 6502 resources
The "second front page" is http://wilsonminesco.com/links.html .
What's an additional VIA among friends, anyhow?

Since this topic is more populated, I suppose I could pitch in.

First, thank you Gordon and BDD for those examples. And thank you George for the offer.

Am I seeing it right that those examples are primarily software technical manuals? I do feel I could make a software manual, especially if its concerning software that I myself wrote. I don't think technical manuals on software need to be long and unwieldy, but need to get each function and a few examples in there. Whatever I would do software wise (assembly monitors and BASIC essentially) would be so small I typically fit a "help menu" within 1KB of characters on the ROM itself to display on the screen directly.

And, likewise, I feel that technical manuals on hardware don't need to be super long either. A few flowcharts, timing diagrams, and of course the schematics. Often I put a good deal of "idea" and "flow" as silkscreen on the boards themselves, especially when I have extra room.

But that's my dilemma. I can fit my technical understands and logic for both hardware and software on silkscreen and ROM. This is hardly "curriculum"! That's my bigger hangup. I'm wanting to develop some type of... school book, essentially. Much closer to Garth's website than anything else I've seen. [ And why don't I just let Garth's website be sufficient for this purpose? Good question. ]

And where to start? Would a curriculum start with "this is what electricity is"? Or would it start with "this is binary logic"? Or would it start with Garth's "you need to know what OR-wired means"? If you start from zero, heck, you probably aught to teach the reader basic addition and subtraction!

As a math teacher, I find that how I teach math is primarily giving examples, and then having them repeat on their own or with guidance. My idea of "curriculum" is not a lot of blah blah, but tons of examples, show new concepts with even more examples, then do more examples for practice, etc. Is that how it would be here too?

Thank you everyone.

Chad

Aye Garth, I could rant for hours so probably best that I don't, but I'll point out that the differences are sufficient that every major printing house I know of maintain separate UK and US editors for books which are to be released in both countries.

In short, Noah Webster's spelling changes are obvious and grating to a UK reader's eye; grammar and punctuation changes are much more subtle but still enough occasionally to trip a reader up - particularly where 'woke' prose re-uses existing words with a new meaning - and perhaps most obvious is cultural and social references. That applies both to replacement words (to me, a pavement runs along the side of the road, and isn't the road surface itself; I go to a shopping centre, not a mall) and to context: if you haven't been through the US school or university system, referents there are completely missing. c.f. words which Can Never Be Said, and people who don't know the difference between Those Words and other unrelated words that just sound similar (didn't someone in government get 'resigned' a few years back for correctly using the word 'niggardly' (grudging and petty in giving or spending.))

I accept I may be an outlier: my father was something of a grammar evangelist, and I'm sure I've picked up his habits. And my Master's dissertation was on how to ensure words that don't exist are correctly spelt (!). It's likely that younger people may not immediately notice the difference but it did strike me as something that might be worth considering: write the book to the target audience.

Neil

Spelt is a grain.

(U.S. reader / writer over here! Did you do that on purpose?)

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"The key is not to let the hardware sense any fear." - Radical Brad

Maybe not the only one... I spent 3 years living & working in the US - both coasts, so got to experience dialect differences too.

But I'm Scottish, even though I've lived about half my life outside Scotland I'm back in Scotland again where it seems that we're "reclaiming" oor langwidge and dialect again. An why no?

Oh how we laughed back in '78 when the first Apple IIs came over with their color graphics and catalog of discs ... Very quickly turned into groans but there you go - 2 nations separated by a common language, as it were...

-Gordon

_________________
--
Gordon Henderson.
See my Ruby 6502 and 65816 SBC projects here: https://projects.drogon.net/ruby/