Altairduino "case mod"

[Tom Wilson]

I'm just gonna leave this here....

[Tom Lake]

I like it! 

[Randy]

Now THAT is hilarious and simply wonderful.

[Tom Wilson]

:-)

I tried acrylic paint on another box, but that didn’t come out as well as I wanted. This is actually adhesive backed vinyl from Hobby Lobby.

[Jim McClanahan]

I've been thinking about mounting mine to a shelf on the rack in the ham shack.

Right now it is just setting there, but this would give it some stability (I'm thinking I would use a small metal bar across the bottom of the case and two bolts) and I might even cut out most of the back so I could add some ancillary odds and ends behind it. I was thinking of painting it black first, so I'm glad to hear your experience with acrylic paint,

Thanks,

Jim W4JBM

[Tom Wilson]

The paint didn’t actually look bad, but I had a lot of problems masking the edges for the different colors. I think it was the rough, grainy surface of the wood. Painting it a solid color, such as black works fine. In fact, I painted the back of my first box charcoal, and that part looks great. I just never got a straight, solid line when trying to paint the box by hand.

Spray painting it a solid color should work great.

[Terry Fox]

I was doing a very similar thing... I had some vinyl tape left over from rc plane construction. The blue is fine, but the white is too thin, snd the blue shows through. I think Walmart has some colored tape rolls in their paint dept.

[Tom Lake]

Now you should apply some tape to the front edge of the box and wrap it around inside the lip so there's no wood showing!. The original Altair has blue all the way around the front panel.

[Tom Wilson]

That’s the plan. I’ve just been having too much fun programming. I’ve written a machine language assembler (opcode-complete, handles forward references, doesn’t support mathematic expressions yet) and a terminal client (working on ANSI code support right now.)

When all that is done, I’m going to take a closer look at the c# emulator I found. I’m considering porting the Altairduino example code and writing an interface layer to make the Arduino act as a programmer’s panel for an emulator running on the PC.

[Pete Rittwage]

Nice!

You can get the same kind of enclosure in various places for a couple hundred bucks. It would be a lot of wasted space, but neat nonetheless....

[Tom Wilson]

So far , no one has found a mass-produced enclosure that's really close to the Altair case.

Personally, I want to mount a PC inside one, so if anyone puts together an order for a custom chassis, I may have to take part in that. As it is, I'm looking for a slightly larger box for the Altairduino so I can mount the Raspberry Pi inside (I'm using the Pi as a terminal and, eventually, as a serial breakout box. See this thread.) 

If you do know of a project box that's similar in design, please let me know. So far, everything I've found has been different enough that it's not worth the effort and money to acquire it.  The closest one I've found so far is the Elma Type 32 Basic Case. Functionally, the closest thing today would be a 19" rack enclosure, but the Altair obviously didn't have rack ears. 

[Tom Wilson]

Huh. Peter sent me an email off-list, and following the trail from what he found, I found something much closer, if still not quite “it.”

http://www.newark.com/hoffman-enclosures/erc4u4843/19-case-6u-desk-top-aluminum-grey/dp/88F2651

[Tom Lake]

$600.00 seems a little steep to enclose a $150 computer, though. :(

[Jim McClanahan]

When you can get the Altair clone that comes with a case for $621, I'd agree. :-) Why not just have another Altair around for fun.

[Tom Wilson]

Can you still get the Altair “clone”? It looks like the ‘duino is the only one one available right now.

[Tom Lake]

The link at 

http://altairclone.com/ordering.htm

Is still active. Have you tried to click on Add to Cart?

[Tom Lake]

I just tried it. It works. It takes me to the PayPal checkout page. The only ones available are fully assembled, though.

[Tom Wilson]

Well @#$&. There went $710.

[Tom Lake]

If you've never used one, you're in for a treat. It has a more realistic feel to it than the AltairDuino. You can load EPROMS into high memory just as you can

in the real ones (CDBL, ROM BASIC, debuggers, monitors etc.) One limitation it has that the AD overcomes brilliantly is that, to change disks, you have to

connect to a PC. Also, it has no ready-to-run software such a kill-the-bit in it (as I said, more like the original Altair) There's no Bluetooth, just three serial ports.

It does come with the cassette adapter (I hope you didn't order that separately!) so you can load and save real cassettes with it. It's much more reliable than the

original Altair. I can load 4K, 8K or Extended BASIC and use CSAVE/CLOAD and they all load flawlessly and work perfectly. The original Altair was very sensitive 

of the volume and tone controls on the recorder and sometimes even the position of the connecting cables. I have a Teletype ASR-33 (that I can swap out for an 

ADM-5) a high-speed paper tape reader/punch and a serial printer hooked up to mine. Mike Douglas is one of the good guys (just like Chris) who goes out of his 

way to help people so If you have a problem, he'll be glad to do what he can to resolve it.

[Tom Wilson]

Thanks, Tom.

That sounds perfect. I knew the AlairKit was no longer being produced; for some reason I thought this one was that.  The AltairKit is actually a 1:1 reproduction of the original, with some cleanup work done to fix MITS's mistakes.

Since I have two Raspberry Pis available, I'm planning on using one as a terminal for the Altair. In fact, there's so much room in the Altair Clone's case that I'll have plenty of room to store the Pi and my mini-monitor inside the case. And since uploading floppy images is done with XModem, it'll be simple enough to run all that on the Pi. (I should find a copy of TeraTerm for ARM. That'll be tonight's project.)

Thanks again for pointing me to that. My wallet hates you right now, but he rest of me is pretty happy. 

[Tom Lake]

My apologies to your wallet. (although my wife is taking your wallet's side)

[Tom Wilson]

Well, there's no wife to complain about my spending habits, and I just got my annual bonus. I was going to get a VR ready graphics card for the living room PC, but meh. The kid can suffer on the laptop for a few more months. 

[Tom Lake]

No wife? Hmm. Don't let my wife know or she'll invite you to dinner and just "happen" to have one of her single friends over on the same night! Speaking of my wife, She walked in just as I hit the buy button for the Altair Clone. Oooh! Was she mad, thinking I was actually buying one! It took some convincing to show her I was just testing the connection.

[Steve Terry]

My favorite part of that photo is the white tape on the switches to group them in Hex rather than Octal.  I had an original Altair that I used for about three years in my business to run WordStar. An essential mod was strips of bank Dymo tape to group the switches for Hex entry to be able to quickly toggle in the boot loader.

[Terry Fox]

Real CP/Mers use octal!! The 8008 and 8080 CPUs seem to be designed around octal, as many instructions have breaks between bits 6-5 and 3-2 in the opcodes. I can still remember many instructions simply because of the octal breakpoints. Moves (01-dest-Sri), ADDs, even jumps are all octal-split binary. While the Intel 8080 Programming Manual describes opcodes, etc in hex, if one looks at the actual binary representations, the octal becomes obvious in many instructions.

My first computer was a self-designed 8080 S-100 style (in smoked plexiglass case), that had seven-segment displays for data and address, and a 16-key calculator-style keyboard. Doing octal on the front panel was much easier than the Altair. One could do hand-coding without even looking up any opcodes. I had previously built a Mark-8 for the local ham TV club repeater (Metrovision), so my biggest issue was going between 8080 and 8008 CPUs!

Hex is the devil’s handiwork!! Ha ha.
Terry

[Tom Wilson]

Thanks, Steve. Yeah, the hex/octal thing was throwing me for a loop, so I used the tape at first. Now I have some red and white switch covers, and both of my Altairs look good that way. The white and red switch covers are in 4-bit patterns, and of course the physical spacing of the switches is in 3-bit patterns. 

What's interesting is that I found it actually is easier to enter hand-assembled code when using octal, since you only have to remember 8 patterns, but most material these days uses hex, so I find myself switching back and forth (no pun intended.)

Thing is... I've kind of burned out on the Altair stuff. I still have both the Altairduino and the Altair clone. The Altairduino is much more hacker friendly, since I have source for the system, but the 'clone looks better. The problem with the clone is its creator doesn't want to distribute source code, so if I wanted to hack that system, I'd have to start from the ground up.

I'm actually considering ordering another Altairduino and mounting the parts on a perf board so they fit the Altair Clone's panel; then I can have the benefits of the clone with its larger enclosure and the 'duino with its more flexibile emulation.

[Tom Lake]

If you ever decide to create a kit to get the Arduino Duo working with the Clone, I'd be first in line to buy one!

[Tom Wilson]

I don't know how to go about having a PCB printed, but if I did, I'd just take the Altairduino PCB and scale it up 10% or so to fit the Altair Clone's panel. Since I can't do that, I was planning just buying a perf board, a pack of 1K resistors, and a set of toggle switches. 

From there, it's just a matter of hooking everything up; it really shouldn't need a kit, just some time with a soldering iron and 150 or so hookup wires. :)

[martin baker]

Nice! I haven't done the off-white on mine yet but I didn't want to leave the case as it came either. I've read some comments about people having trouble with the wood grain but after using scannable primer first I haven't had any problems at all yet.

I also was lucky enough to have read the comments about the LEDs being too bright with the 150 ohm resistors BEFORE I soldered them. My local source for electronics was out of 1k so I bought the closest they had, 620 ohm, and I'm very happy with the results.

This is one of the best kits I've ever built. Very rewarding!

[martin baker]

Odd, the picture of the rear panel has some strange artifacts that I just don't understand. There isn't any brownish strip nor the silver thingadiddle just above the top "nut" for the serial port. At least I haven't noticed anything like that I'm I can't believe I wouldn't have! Now I need to go take another look!

[martin baker]

Sandable, not scannable, primer. I HATE my spell corrector sometimes.