Raspberry Pi supporters - own a bit of history

By -
A few days ago I found an old friend - an Acorn Microcomputer dating back to the late 1970s. You might know it by its later name of Acorn System 1.

It's arguably the great-great-grandfather of Raspberry Pi ( though several orders of magnitude less powerful). Acorn fathered ARM, whose design lies at the heart of RasbPi's processor; the processor is made by Broadcom, who also trace their ancestry back to Acorn.

The Acorn Microcomputer has an led display, a keyboard, a 6502 processor, 512 bytes of rom and an amazing 1k of ram. The monitor (a minimalist operating system) lives in rom; programs can be saved and then reloaded using a cassette recorder. It will run off a 9v battery. Somehow I've managed to hang on to its documentation, though you'll find a lot more information, and an emulator, on Mike Colishaw's website.

I've done nothing with this early micro for years, and I'd pretty much decided to give it to a museum. I suspect it still works, though I haven't tried to apply power yet.

Then I read about the latest batch of  RasbPi boards and the plans to auction some, and wondered if the Raspberry Pi project would care to auction this fore-runner to raise more money for the project.

If you would like to own this bit of computing history, head over to the Raspberry Pi forum and encourage the RasbPi team to get in touch and auction it!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Controlling a Raspberry Pi Pico remotely using PySerial

By -
Image
Update : I'm using thie code below in another project, and found that I had not correctly fixed the reported bug. The new version passes automated tests, and I am pretty sure it works OK. I have changed the name of the class to Talker  since it can both send and receive information. Apologies to all concerned for the bug! Introduction You can use a Raspberry Pi Pico as a powerful peripheral to a host - a Raspberry Pi, a Jetson Nano, a laptop or workstation. In this article you'll see how to interact with a Pico running MicroPython or CircuitPython by writing some Python code that runs on the host. The software is easy to use. It enables you to send a Python statement to the Pico and read the results. The statement can be any valid MicroPython code. Setting up the host and the Pico For this article I've used a Raspberry Pi as the host, but any computer running Windows, Linux or Mac OS will do so long as it has Python 3.5 or later installed. In particular, you can use this t...
Read more

Five steps to connect Jetson Nano and Arduino

By -
Image
Yesterday's post showed how to link a micro:bit to the Jetson Nano. One of the members of the (unofficial) NVIDIA Jetson Nano group on Facebook asked about connecting an Arduino to the Jetson. Here's a simple recipe for getting data from the Arduino to the Jetson Nano. It should work on all the Jetson models, not just the Nano, but I only have Nanos to hand. On request, I've added a recipe at the end of this post which sends data from the Jetson Nano to the Arduino; it turns the default LED on the Arduino on or off. The recipe for sending data from the Arduino to the Jetson has just 5 stages: Program the Arduino. (I used the ASCIITable example). Connect the Arduino to the Jetson using a USB connector Install pyserial on the Jetson Download a three-line Python script Run the script.   Programming the Arduino I used an Arduino Uno, and checked it on a verteran Duemilanove (above), but any Arduino should work. You'll need to do this step usi...
Read more

Raspberry Pi Pico project 2 - MCP3008

By -
Image
This post show you how to drive the MCP3008 8-channel ADC using a Raspberry Pi Pico. I'll start with a personally embarrassing and annoyingly relevant story. I'll also tell you about a minor 'gotcha' when using SPI on the Pico, and how you can avoid it. Finally, I've include the code and fritzing diagram I used to test the interface. First, the story. Back in 2012, when the Raspberry Pi was fresh and new, I was running a startup called Quick2Wire.  We made add-on boards for the Pi. Just before Christmas we sent out our first batch of boards to a small army of beta-testers. The beta boards didn't work. Somehow a single trace on the pcb had got deleted and one of the GPIO pins was isolated. The boards were still usable and it wasn't too hard to solder in a jumper wire to replace the missing trace, but it was very embarrassing. It wasn't just that we'd shipped boards with a defect. The really annoying thing was that I'd set up an  automated loop-bac...
Read more