Hi all. I've had a project simmering away off and on, and with a bit of encouragement from BigEd, I've finally made a thread about it.
So, to that end, may I present Ittiara, my work-in-progress handheld.
I started out wanting to build a sort of electronic storage typewriter, as I was having distraction issues with word processors on computers. I ended up just building a bridge and getting over it. Sometime later, I saw Ben Heck's Pocket BASIC computer video. That inspired me to make something sort of similar using the 6502. Ittiara is the development of that idea.
Basically, I'm going for a 65C02-based handheld computer with a bit of a large environment on it for fooling around, and enough GPIO to do things.
I'm not opposed to using microcontrollers as peripherals, as long as it doesn't get ridiculous.
Planned features/goals: - Self-contained, portable system. No extra equipment needed to use it. Display, keyboard and battery built in. - Battery-powered. Preferably a LiFePO4(safer than a LiPo), and preferably regulated with a switching regulator. - Some sort of UI, possibly menu-driven. - Clock speed of 8MHz or higher. The current EEPROM I'm using will limit me to 4MHz, by the specs, but there are reports of overclocking. If I get a 7ns RAM and battery-back it, I could run it up to 13MHz, by the specs, but I could also use an FeRAM, if I can find a 5V parallel one. - Graphics capability. - Sound capability, preferably a SID or similar. My current leaning is a SIDcog running in a Propeller, as I can adapt that with a little extra hardware to sit on a high-speed bus. - SPI interface using 65SPI and SPI-10. Two each of 3V3 and 5V ports. mainly for storage. - Assembler, Text editor, HLL, Monitor. I might end up integrating the assembler into the monitor. Currently planning to use VTL-02 as the HLL(due to its small size), although having just heard of Action!, I might try implementing/using that. I could also use EhBASIC or FORTH. - SPI and serial loaders for HLL, text editor, and binaries.
"Stretch goals": - Self-hosting, with a means to write to it's own ROM in-place. - Hot-swappable SPI-10 ports.
The current prototype is constructed with wires soldered to the underside of a pad-per-hole breadboard. Bit of a mess under there. I'm using sockets for everything I think I might re-use later, including the reset circuit and 7805 regulator. Basically, all the silicon on the board is in a socket. I also have the display and keyboard. The display is a SparkFun Serial Graphic LCD, and the keyboard is an RC2014 Universal Micro Keyboard, with the serial option and slightly modified firmware(It gives me backspace, and I think that's it...). I want to move to a PCB, and I'm currently building a hierarchical schematic in KiCAD for that purpose.
My current problem with it is that while it works perfectly when I use an FTDI cable and a terminal emulator, but when I connect the display, sometimes it doesn't start, or hangs. And sometimes the keyboard seems to send shifted characters when the shift key isn't being held. I suspect that might be power distribution triggering the reset IC, but I'm not sure.
EDIT 14/10/2017: Added current circuit diagram and a few photos.
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Last edited by DerTrueForce on Sat Oct 14, 2017 8:06 am, edited 1 time in total.
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