Some words on the hardware used

The SMART Response XE terminal was designed years ago as an interactive terminal used in colleges. It is now a bit obsolete and can be purchased on Ebay for a tenth of its original price. For a few dollars you have a keyboard, a screen, and a ATmega128RFA1 processeur (an ATmega128 with wireless interface). The processor has 128kB of program Flash, 16kB of RAM and 4kB of EEPROM. The terminal integrates also a serial Flash that can be used too. As it is an ATmega, with minimum work, the software can be designed in the Arduino IDE giving access to all the existing softwares and libraries that were developed in the Arduino ecosystem.

I have bought 2 terminals and opened one to reverse engineer the schematic with the help of some hires pictures found here.

Some words on the softwares I rely on

The library I use is based on bitbank2 work. He has made a library that handles all the low level of the SMART Response XE Terminal. It manage the keyboard, the display. Some word on the display. It is probably the weakest link in this system, it has a good resolution but two drawbacks.

• pixels are written three at a time
• it is not possible to read back the frame memory

These two limitations prevent from making elaborate drawing as when setting a pixel you can modify two others.

These limitations are the reason why I will first work on text interface only for the BASIC.

The BASIC I will use is based on Robin Hedwards work. He has made an Arduino BASIC that works well and it needs not too much adaptation to work with the terminal.