Over the years, we’ve brought you many stories of the creative artwork behind electronic event badges, but today we may have a first for you. [Spencer] thinks nobody before him has made a badge powered by a Z80, and we believe he may be right. He’s the originator of the RC2014 Z80-based retrocomputer, and the badge in question comes from the recent RC2014 Assembly.
Fulfilling the function of something you can write your name on is a PCB shaped like an RC2014 module, with LEDs on all the signal lines. It could almost function as a crude logic analyser for the system, were the clock speed not far too high to see anything. To fix this, [Spencer]’s badge packs a single-board RC2014 Micro with a specially slow clock, and Z80 code to step through all memory addresses, resulting in a fine set of blinkenlights.
Thus was created the first Z80-based event badge, and we’re wondering whether or not it will be the last. If you’re curious what this RC2014 thing is about, we reviewed the RC2014 Micro when it came out.
Well now that’s just starting something. Next will be the 6502 crowd, then the 8051s, then the 8080s, and someone will eventually find a supplier of 4004s.
6502 was already done in 2017 for VCF-MW
https://sunrise-ev.com/6502.htm
Hackerboxes has had a Z80 based Defcon badge for a year. It was vaporware for a long time.
I know of at least one (Angry Cat) badge that uses emulated Z80 to run CP/M on a badge.
Oh no you don’t. I just happened to come across a tube of Z80’s and another with 8051’s the other day. I’ve got enough going with ESP32 projects and you’re not going to get me interested in going back to working on 8 bit microprocessors (Well at least not now). Did a bunch of them back in the day and it was quite a hoot…..Keep going, it looks like fun.
Cheers.