An amazing looking successor to the PERSEUS-8 desktop computer, which we had previously, this rugged wire-wrapped portable comes with two 6502 CPUs, a die-cast aluminum case, 40 x 7 LED character display, and features an integrated serial terminal.
HN offers this video linked from within the hackaday page:
That’s a very industrial case for it all!
Very retro in looks and function too…
-Gordon
That display must have cost a small fortune!
There’s another article featuring this computer, with a real world application:
Coming back to this, my curiosity was aroused, so I investigated the display. It’s made up of several HCMS-2972 modules; Each 8 characters of a 5x7 LED matrix. They are driven via a serial interface - effectively a write-only SPI with clock and data signals and the can be daisy-chained to form what’s effectively a huge shift-register.
So updating the display effectively means sending the whole thing for every single update, character move, scroll, etc. Not too bad if you have a fast shift and clock mechanism.
You can buy then today - they’re about £34.42 from Mouser (UK) for the 8x1 module.
So… The 40 characters x 7 lines needs 35 units, or about £1,225 worth of display modules.
So yes, a small fortune indeed.
Nice though…
Cheers,
-Gordon
Yes, back when those displays were released (in my youth, last century sometime) they weren’t cheap, and time hasn’t done much to reduce their price (given they’re a specialty/novelty item, that’s probably understandable).
