Hands-on review: Raspberry Pi 2- The thrill of tinkering

Business Spectator ^ | 02/18/2015 | JOANNA STERN

[GeronL]

Yep. Video game will never catch on!

lol

[Myrddin]

The Micro-68 was made by a local company in San Diego. I wanted to teach my students the 6809 instruction set as well. I wrote a replacement ROM for the Micro-68 and a plug-in replacement board to route the 6809 pins to the 6800 on the board. It worked well and supported the full register and instruction set for the 6809. I was late to market. EPA dropped the EPA-68000 in my lab. It was time to embrace the 32-bit world. I was thrilled and disappointed. My new job at PacBell took me north 25 miles and added 24x7 site support for the computer center. That made the teaching engagement impossible to continue.

[Myrddin]

Nice. My trainer boards still work. I couldn't lay my hands on the EPA Micro-68, so I settled for a Heathkit equivalent in a cardboard box. I have two working Heathkit H-8 machines. One has the stock 8080A CPU. The upgraded one has a Trionyx 5 MHz Z80, three layer backplane, 5 port serial board, Trionyx 64k dynamic memory board, a sound board and video controller (home grown). The video board has a TI 9918A graphics processor on board. I used the Foley and Van Damme graphics book for algorithms and Software Toolworks C compiler to fashion a full bit-mapped display with sprites and 3D wire frame drawing capability. That was the best I could pull off with 1984 technology.

[Myrddin]

I have a Raspberry Pi Model B. It runs a Debian flavor of Linux called Raspbian. You need a monitor with HDMI and a cell phone charger with a micro USB to light it off. The bare board needs an SD card flash memory to provide a boot target that is initialized from a downloaded image. Add a USB keyboard/mouse and Ethernet connection for a working system. A very good value.

[Kid Shelleen]

Can anybody recommend some good links for home projects?
My interest is home automation but any quick starter projects will do. I like Linux but I am also interested in Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi when it is ready.
Thanks in advance.