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I will occasionally see a (constructed) one of these kits pop up on eBay for $100+. Has anyone here bought or built one? Where did you get the parts?
by krallja 5y ago
I will occasionally see a (constructed) one of these kits pop up on eBay for $100+. Has anyone here bought or built one? Where did you get the parts?
- cguess 5y agoIf you want to build your own 6502 this is a great kit with amazing tutorials. He sells all the parts, but you can also source your own from Adafruit or whatever easily https://eater.net/6502 https://eater.net/6502
- Teknoman117 5y agoOne of the big things about Ben Eater's kits is that all the parts he uses in his videos are still in production. Other CPUs from that era are super interesting (Motorola 6800, 6809, the 68000, etc., Intel 8086, etc.), but they are no longer produced, so building systems requires sourcing new-old-stock or e-waste pulls from places like eBay, AliExpress, utsource, and so on. Eventually there will be no more of them. I believe the only CPUs from that era still being manufactured are modern CMOS variants of the Z80, 6502, and 65816. Their clock rates are 10-20x what they were in the late 70's / early 80's.
- krallja 5y ago68K’s are still produced by Rochester Electronics; they are still used in some embedded systems (allegedly automotive systems?), which is good news for kit builders!
- Teknoman117 5y agoI'd never bumped into them before, interesting. Are you referring to this: https://www.rocelec.com/news/motorola-6800 https://www.rocelec.com/news/motorola-6800 ?
- krallja 5y agoI was talking about the 68k, not the 6.8k, but that’s very exciting news to me! Love it when a vintage chip reenters production.
- Teknoman117 5y agoThe tail end of that article mentions the 68000 based products. Unfortunately looking up the part numbers for the reproduced ones on digikey has them marked as obsolete.
- krallja 5y agoBen Eater kickstarted this whole hobby into my brain! I’m (hopefully) starting a 68010 breadboard computer this summer; already have the parts, just need to find the time. Another fun (soldering) kit-maker is Lee Hart at sunrise-ev.com. His kits are always surprising in their cleverness yet understandability. Almost all of them have a 9600 baud serial port, yet no ACIA/UART in sight!
- tyingq 5y agoTindie.com is also a good source for some of these, sometimes with parts included.
- vertnerd 5y agoIf the vendor is kswichit then I believe it is produced by Wichit Sirichote himself. I purchased a 6502 constructed board on eBay a couple of years ago, then followed up by purchasing four more directly from Sirichote himself. I used the boards to teach a series of short, introductory courses in CPU architecture and programming and the boards have worked flawlessly. I was prompted to post the link today when I realized what a saint the guy is and how he needs more recognition.