arduinoenigma wrote:
As a KIM-Uno owner, the Micro Kim kit was looking attractive, much better display control. If the motivation to keep the store going is gone, I second opening up the design. OscarV has all the design files up in the website and still sells kits to those not willing to source all the parts by themselves.
The MicroKim was based on Ruud Baltissen's
"build your own KIM" page and of course the original KIM-1 schematic. As far as I know, the MicroKim schematic has always been "open" though there's no explicit license anywhere on the website.
The PCB design is not open-source. That's understandable; otherwise any opportunist could produce their own PCB's or kits and make a quick buck at Vince's expense. I could probably reverse-engineer the MicroKim PCB design pretty easily and sell it as a kit, but I'm not going to, at least not without Vince's permission. And I would think it's only fair that he would make some money off every sale, even if I would redesign the board from scratch and made improvements.
I think Vince did an excellent job with the MicroKim (and his other designs too). MicroKim is a good compromise between an exact replica with all the original parts (like, say, the Mike Willegal Apple 1 clone) and a low-cost emulator that's nothing like the original but just works that way (like, say, the KIM-Uno). It used parts that weren't anachronistic to solve the problem that the 6530s are unobtainium. Of all Vince's replica projects, MicroKim was probably the most true to the original, and it was reasonably priced.
===Jac