alphasmart pro

TL;DR; I’m repurposing these keyboard+cases into a programming and interfacing tool that I can use much like a flexible 8-bit home computer. Serial input/output, HDMI display, more.

I stumbled onto a couple of items called AlphaSmart Pro. At first glance I thought that they were some home computers from the 1980s.

They look a lot like the 8 bit computer-in-a-keyboard that were prevalent at that time. Look at what Google gives you when you search images for 8 bit home computers:

Google image search for 8-bit home computer

The AlphaSmart Pro wasn’t a 1980s general-purpose 8 bit home computer. It has a lot of the 8-bit guts to have been a home computer – 8-bit processor, RAM, ROM, etc. The AlphaSmart Pro was instead used to type text away from a PC and then return to the PC and upload that text through a PS2 keyboard port. Here is a bit of info from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaSmart

There were quite a few of those 1980s computers that I had thought would be great to have, and I’ve even had a few come through the lab. I did have a TRS80 Model III at one point that I used as an interface (controller) to some electronics. I think that a small 8-bit style of computer would be nice to have on my workbench. Something that can give me I/O lines to control, serial signals, etc.

Eventually it might be a front-end for several different retrocomputer projects. I recently received a single board Z80 computer: https://hackaday.io/project/159973-z80-mbc2-4ics-homemade-z80-computer The z80 was the architecture that I did the most assembly programming on. I have some 6502 chips in storage, too.

Besides the Z80 and 6502 computer modules, this project will be great for interfacing to the CircuitGizmo MicroMite devices. These all run BASIC and are a 32-bit implementation of retrocomputers. I use these at my bench quite often.