techav

@techav.net

23 Followers 27 Following

A recovering art major with over a decade in IT and half a lifetime building and programming tech projects.

Scan of the centerfold of "Color in the Workplace", a document for IBM by designer Paul Rand. The spread has four rows of illustrations of various IBM computer components, demonstrating color combinations available for purchase.
Wyse WY-55 terminal main board with soldered-in battery.
A photograph of the initial functional PikaPC phase 2 setup. Four PCBs are plugged into a backplane (from back to front): host, video, power, and protoboard. Logic analyzer probes are attached to the protoboard card on front.
PikaPC phase 2 modular system in a minimal configuration with just host card and power card on a backplane. The host card is wired to a logic analyzer which can be seen running in the background
screenshot of a terminal showing neofetch output running on a 1999 model PowerMac G4. NetBSD 9.4 macppc; uptime 6 minutes; 5 packages; 'sh' shell; [PPC] 7400 rev 1 CPU, 323MiB of 2048MiB memory in use.
Close zoom image of the Mandelbrot fractal set rendered on PikaPC and displayed via S3 Trio64V+.
Screen capture of a Mandelbrot rendering program running on PikaPC, a homebrew PowerPC computer. It begins rendering the entire set, then zooms in on a small point. The video has been accelerated to 1.1x to reduce the total runtime from 3:03 to below the Bluesky 3 minute limit.
Grayscale render of the Mandelbrot fractal set created using PikaPC homebrew computer and an S3 Trio64V+ graphics chip.
A mess of 40 test leads attached to the PikaPC protoboard card. There are so many test leads, the PikaPC prototype main board is nearly completely obscured.
The new modular PikaPC, with power supply card, protoboard card, DRAM card, and host card plugged into the backplane.
A video of a hand-wired test card plugged into PikaPC, my PowerPC homebrew computer prototype. The card has four LEDs that are lighting in a binary counting pattern.
Photograph of a table in a library makerspace. Piles of newly-minted stickers are in the foreground. In the background, a Cricut device is busy cutting more stickers.
Invoice summary for PikaPC phase 2 PCBs. Merchandise total for 5 designs: $24. Shipping estimate: $55.90. Tariffs: $10.80. Grand total: $90.70.
Wire-side of the PikaPC homebrew computer main board with several thin wires removed from their posts but currently trapped under all of the wires that were placed after they were originally installed.
Loading and a BASIC program from disk and running it on one user console of Multibasic, a minimal multiuser kernel for Wrap030, my 68030 homebrew computer.
Kernel panic printout, which is great because it means that now my homebrew computer is getting far enough along in the NetBSD startup process to actually be able to generate a kernel panic.
Serial terminal output from "Wrap030", a 68030 homebrew computer, showing the startup sequence and booting a test program from disk. The test program is initializing a hardware timer, which is triggering an interrupt (IRQ 4). The test program is acknowledging the interrupt, returning to the main loop, and resetting the timer.
Photograph of a page in a graph paper spiral notebook showing hand-drawn signal flow diagram. The homebrew computer it will run on can be seen in the background.
A mess of rainbow-colored wires and logic analyzer probes attached to a sparsely-populated printed circuit board.