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A project log for Altair 8800 front panel Ardiuno shield

A very small fully-functional interface for an Arduino Due emulating an Altair 8800

justin-davisJustin Davis 03/15/2017 at 15:270 Comments

First, got my project on the front page of Hackaday which I thought was very cool. Thanks to everyone for the encouragement!

Second, I figured I'd better check out the rest of my board. I soldered on the microSD card receptacle and the Bluetooth comm headers. So I have a photo of the finished version of the top-side with the microSD card installed.

Then I flipped the board over to solder on the SPI connector. And that's when I realized I made another mistake. The pitch on the connector is only 50mils. I'm not sure how I made that mistake, but I think the only fix for this is messy. I only need to connect 3 pins on that header, so I may try to hack on three individual posts. I knew I took a risk by going with a surface mount header. I also chose one which did not have alignment posts, so I knew alignment could have been a problem. I think I may go back to a through-hole header for rev B. I went away from it mostly for aesthetics (there would be a 6-pin connector between my switches). I'm not sure if I will ever make a second run of boards just because of the cost, but if enough people are interested, then I will. I should order a bluetooth module to check out that header too before I make a rev B.

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