RC2014 Stand At Liverpool Make Fest

[Spencer Owen]

Some of you may be interested to hear about the RC2014 stand at Liverpool Make Fest yesterday, so I thought I'd give a rundown of things from my side of the stand.  I didn't get to see much of the event myself, but if you want to see more about what was going on, have a look on Twitter for hashtag LivMF2015

Firstly, a big Thank You to David McMurry and Steve Barnet for the loan of their RC2014s.  I had originally planned to take more up from my stock - but (unfortunately!) a big run of orders last week meant I didn't have any to take.

I don't normally do 4am starts, but in order to get to Liverpool by train, this had to be done.  Everything went well, I found the venue ok and I arrived with half an hour to get my stand set up.

https://twitter.com/ZxSpectROM/status/746621455715209216

There were 4 RC2014s on display;

The RC2014 on the right, had a Pi Zero module fitted which was connected to a VGA adapter and 14" monitor, and a small wireless keyboard.  It was housed in the wooden lasercut enclosure, and also had a Digital I/O module, although this wasn't used.  It ran Filippos port of Snake most of the day which was very popular with the youngsters there and some of the not-so-young too.  I think 390 was the record for the day!

Next to that was another one with a Pi Zero module, and this was connected to a 5" HDMI screen on a nice cute easel.  This one had my hand-made BBC Micro:bit adapter module and a Digital I/O module .  The perspex enclosure was extended to house my mini keyboard.  There were a few programs stored on the Micro:bit that could be "typed" in with a few button presses, such as a demo program to show off the colour screen, a traditional Mastermind game converted from a ZX81 listing, the classic 10 Print Chr$ program, and a Larson scanner for the Digital I/O module.

Steve's RC2014 was connected to my laptop via FTDI and ran a variable speed Larson scanner program (Speed changes depending which button was pushed).  AXB Labs had a stall opposite me, and I couldn't resist a RGB LED breakout board for 50p, so in the afternoon I set this up with the Digital Output module and had that cycling through the colours with a slightly modified Larson scanner program.

Dave's RC2014 was also set up with the laptop, and this was used as a general BASIC terminal that people used to show off their coding skills with a '10 PRINT "hello" 20 GOTO 10' program.  It was also a great example of what you get with the Full Monty kit compared to the others which were more like suggestions of what you could do with an RC2014.

Ken Boak arrived along with Toby Yu, and we discussed RC2014 improvements and component sourcing. I've also got a couple of hefty books on Z80 design and CP/M to read.  Thanks Ken!

Interest in the RC2014 stand was mixed - as you'd expect.  Some people glanced at the stand then headed off.  Some asked what it was, then their eyes glazed over as I started to explain.  Others seemed to get drawn to the stand from the other side of the room as if being summoned by a tractor beam (Note to self: I need to design a tractor beam module for RC2014).  These people seemed really interested, asked lots of good questions, and shared their experiences with Z80, BASIC and Forth coding.  I'm sure there's going to be a few more members of our RC2014 community as a result of this!

The show finished about 5pm, and I got everything packed away and off to the train station in plenty of time for my journey back.  Not being prepared for the torrential rain when I got back to Nottingham was the only downside to the day.

Anyway, I hope these ramblings were of interest to some of you.

Thanks

Spencer

[Filippo Bergamasco]

Hey Spencer,

nice to hear such good stories. Sounds like a lot of fun to me :) 

Actually, I'm amazed by the fact that my 30-minutes-of-coding snake game lasted the horde of youngsters  :P 

But, from the image it looks like the right wall of the game field was not visible, is it so?

You have to be proud of your product. It seems quite mature to me and that's why it attracts so many! It is already cooked enough to just solder it and play but still in an early stage on the software side so that one can still produce something completely new to the platform.

Congrats! 

Filippo

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[Spencer Owen]

Thanks Filippo!

Yes, I am proud of the RC2014 :D I'm particularly liking the different aspects that appeal to different people.

Yes, the right wall is visible... it is over on the left side of the screen :-/ There is also a block up in the top left, and I think that has shifted everything over 1 block.  Not a big issue, but it can be a surprise if you don't know how far the playing field extends to the right. 

I did have a problem with the Snake machine a couple of times actually, and resetting it fixed it.  The problem was that pushing 'n' for a new game didn't work.  Eventually, I worked out that caps lock was on (easy to hit when next to 'a' key), so it was 'N' for a new game that wasn't working.  Again, not a big issue now that I'm aware of it.

By the way, how much work would it be to have Snake read an input port instead of the keyboard?  For example INP(1) where 1,2,4&8 correspond to up, down, left, right?  It would be really easy to make a joystick port for the RC2014, and Snake would be great with a joystick :-)

Cheers

Spencer

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[Filippo Bergamasco]

I'm sorry for the bugs, it wasn't meant to be shown to a lot of people :D   But if the people like it, I'll give it a polish so it can be a great demo next time.

The joystick should be easy to implement. The only fear I have is that I'm not using interrupts so it may be frustrating for the user if it misses some commands. We can try a simple implementation to see if it's satisfactory enough :)

Filippo

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[David McMurray]

Thanks for a review of the day, I wish I could have made it over there!

Dave