This evening I took Dodo out for the first time. Earlier today I just happened to notice that Hackaday was having a 'show and tell' meetup at a local pub not too far from where I live. I have been wanting to go to one of these meetups but they have always been on Mondays which don't work for me. This was the first one on a Thursday.

The only hiccup with bringing Dodo out is power. So far I have been powering Dodo with a bench supply. I did not want to bring a bench supply to a bar. I scrounged through my things and found a AA pack that holds 4 batteries. I am using a 7805 voltage regulator and it has a 2v dropout which means I really should have 7 volts for a clean 5v output. 4 AA batteries is only 6 volts which wouldn't work. I tried it anyway just to see, and it showed signs of life but didn't really run (as expected.) Unfortunately I didn't have any 9V batteries. I decided to hit up Rite Aid on the way, get a battery, and hope that it would work. Thankfully I did have a 9V harness at least.

I did a bit of research and figured that I probably could run Dodo on a 9V battery for about 5 hours. Dodo uses about 100mA which is above the rating for a 9V battery, but I found some discharge graphs for that current level which showed that it should at least work, but will drain pretty fast.

Anyway, Dodo ended up working and I had a blast showing it off! It was fun to share my enthusiasm for 8-bit hardware and I hope to get out to more of these events. There were some other great projects I got to see as well. A guy has made a power controller box for having battery and solar power for his home, and I also got a great idea to automate refilling the fountain in my front yard. I am sick of refilling that fountain.