Construction Projects

  • Here you will find details of completed (or as completed as they are going to be) projects. All the related documentation I have for each project is here.


Work In Progress

Like all mad scientists, I’ve got more projects on the go or sitting on the “back burner” than the mind can comfortably comprehend. Some of these are waiting for inspiration, parts, funding, or just the enthusiasm to get on with them. I’ll release technical details as I go along but it goes without saying that you construct, build and ticker with any of my ideas and designs at your own risk, with the additional risk they may not actually work or get completed.


Breadboard Things

I do a lot of prototype work with breadboards and I will list designs and projects that can be built on breadboards. You will also find hints and ideas that can make using breadboards easier.


Reviews

Sometimes I stumble across a tool, component or gizmo that I think is worthy a review.


Help & Tips

In this section I will list any pearls of wisdom, datasheets, advice and information. In fact, anything that I personally don’t want to forget and that I think others may find useful.


Reference Information

Here you will find useful reference information.


Documentation Archive

Here you will find documentation, manuals, instructions and other hobby related documentation that I don’t want to lose.


Software Projects

Some of my projects are more software than hardware related and details of these will be found here.


Total Articles & Blog Posts

  • For the last 18 months, work has been crazy. Things calmed down around Christmas 2020 and I was hoping to get back into hobby mode but the universe had other ideas. Christmas eve the river burst it’s banks and flooded the house and workshop. I’ve been dealing with the fallout from that ever since.  Thank…


  • Lots going on with this project right now, but I thought I’d do just a very quick update.Another batch of PCBs arrived a couple of days ago and I’m slowly working my way through assembling them. The one thing I’m pleased with is that by replacing the relatively slow (in terms of access speed) EPROM…


  • Last week I’d had enough of that Dataman programmer. It would sometimes work but more often that not Windows would fail to recognise the programmer. I’d tried it on Windows XP and three different Windows 10 machines (one was a brand new out the box machine) and it was always the same. So I sent…


  • I’m sort or regretting buying this Dataman programmer. I need to spend a lot more time trying to figure out exactly what’s going on with it, but assuming my unit doesn’t have some weird intermittent fault, then the quality of the software; specifically the USB driver sucks. I’ve tried this programmer now in three different machines;…


  • One of my ongoing projects is building a replica Acorn System 1 computer and this has required programming EPROMS. Programming EPROMS in itself is fast, but erasing them ready for re-use is time consuming. So for this project I decided to use EEPROMS. Ebay had numerous Chinese sellers listing all types of devices from 2K…


  • I’ve been working on building a replica of an Acorn System 1 machine for quite some time and it’s basically been working, but had a really annoying niggle that I’ve been struggling to fix. Anyway, yesterday I was browsing an online forum and decided to post details about the problem I was having. Talk about…