Z80 SBC 1

From neurotica.com

This is a single-board computer that I designed and built in 2006. It has evolved a bit over time; its main purpose in life is to be a testbed and development system for new ideas for both hardware and software. It serves as my primary development platform for sensor interfacing hardware as well as Forth programming techniques and device support.

I've done a few simple Z80 boards in the past, but this is the first "general purpose" one put together expressly for hacking around.

I've ported a Forth kernel (CamelForth) to this board and have done quite a bit of stuff with that. I've added a full-screen editor, a rudimentary mass-storage system built around an I2C-interfaced flash memory chip, and a bunch of other functionality to the CamelForth system using this board. Many of the concepts developed on this system will be used in a larger, more elaborate research computer that I've been designing off-and-on for a while.

Here are some features of this system:

• Z80A CPU clocked at 4MHz
• 32KB of flash memory
• 32KB of static RAM
• Philips PCF8584 I2C bus controller
• 32KB of I2C-interfaced flash memory
• two serial ports (one is the serial console)
• MicroMega uM-FPU v2 floating point processor
• Philips PCD3312 sound generator (just for fun!)

Photos

The completed system, running.

Bottom view showing wiring.