Electronic

Welcome to the electronic pages.

I have been fascinated by electronics for several years.  Well, since I was a teenager of about 15 or so.  Needless to say, that has been quite a few moons ago.  Well, when my middle child came up to me a told me that he was interested in learning about electronics, it put an involuntary smile on my face.  Really, I asked?  I told him that I thought that it was a cool idea and that maybe, provided I could dust enough cob webs off the old spam jelly covered brain, that I would help him, if I could, on his endeavor to learn.  That was about seven or so months ago. And since then he has taken off.  With the help of some hands on, some of my old college electronic texts and a friend at church who is an EE, Zachary is starting to puzzle his way though and learn.  I am proud of him for taking the time outside of school to pursue something that stimulates the grey matter.

Zachary's learning experience has helped me dust enough dust off the brain that I am starting to think, I would like to try some electronic related projects. I am a computer networking guy by trade, well at least it pays the mortgage, and have been playing with the contraptions since the early 80's when I scraped up enough money from working odd jobs to buy a Commodore Vic 20 and then a little later a Commodore 64.  Wow, how they have changed.  Strangely enough, I sort of miss those days.  Maybe it is my age catching up to me, I don't really know.  And again I ramble ...

I thought it would be a fun project and a great learning experience to scratch build a computer from the processor up.  I know there have been folks on the Net that have done it with the Z80 and the 6502(10) processors.  Well, I have coded machine language on the 6510 back in my commodore days, so I figured if I was going to try it, might as well refresh myself with something I know rather than learning a whole new language for a different processor.

Rather than sit down and decide what the project will be from start to finish, I am going to take the highly unrecommended and unorthodox approach of just letting it ebb and flow and see what happens.  For me, the project is a means of learning and sharing those experience with my son Zachary and anyone else that may be interested in following along.

I will try to break it up into logical areas with the menus on the left, the 6502 project, the how it works section and a resource section for those who would like some other supplemental information.  Good luck and I hope you enjoy the process!