5:18 I first learned machine code over 40 years ago on a 6802 board with a hex keyboard and 6-digit LED display, and I still immediately go "SoftWare Interrupt!" whenever I see "3F".
I still have my senior design project robot based on the 68HC11 from 1990. It was a two wheeled robot using a base from the Radio Shack Robi?JR. It had two cadmium light sensors each in a BIC pen cap for shielding and interfaced to the ultrasonic sensors again from the Robi. 7.2 Nicad with battery monitoring. All wired wrapped lol. Anyway, it was programmed to scan the room, using the front facing cadmium light sensor for dark areas, and move toward the darkest place. Then it would check if it was under a table using the cadmium sensor looking up. After a few minutes it would search the room for another hiding place. It continued this behavior until the batteries were low and activate the ultrasonic sensors to look for the remote ultrasonic beacon, which was always transmitting from a custom circular charging base, a round 12” double sided copper plated circuit board on a metal base. Top negative, bottom positive. It could approach from any angle except where the wires connected. The bot had a custom charge connector using three tempered long connectors in a triangle pattern. Think middle finger top and two fingers bottom. Anyway it could find the charger anywhere within a 12’ distance, approach the base, dock and snuggle to get a good connection until charged and leave to find a new hiding place. It would repeat this behavior for hours. Fun to watch and learned a lot. It sits on a shelf now as a distant memory. I still have the developer kit 😊. Thank you from Central Florida 🌴🇺🇸
Seen it in old NMT cellphones and in SUN keyboards, among other places. Also got Ericsson 10MHz reference for NMT base station having one. Indeed, not in cheap things, but in high end stuff.
I'm quite fond of the earlier microcontrollers, MC6801 and MC6803 (ROM and no ROM), where the ROM part can be strapped to hide the ROM. They sit between the MC6800 and 68HC11, and have excellent Hitachi clones (HD6301/HD6303) with some added instructions of their own.
2010's models still have more or less the same features as this oldie - just more ram and flash. Thought they would've changed more stuff over such a long life
Used 68HC11F1 and A8 chips back in the '80s and '90s. They worked well and the on-chip I/O was powerful. I remember using the edge capture of the timers to implement 3 extra serial input ports. They had a neat "boot from serial" you could use for ROMless or debugging. Had a board with just a RAM chip and it booted off serial and downloaded the code to RAM. All ASM code back in those days. Switched to Microchip PIC as they were cheaper and faster but coding was a bit harder.
ahhhhh, memories - my 1st microcontroller experience after some Z80-magic at university - I had a dev board with variant offering the Bootstrapping-Loader thingy where you could load stuff via RS232 into internal EEPROM/RAM for execution
In the early 1990’s my small company had designed three pieces of test equipment which all used a MC68HC11CFN2. I had one engineer beside myself and he was doing most of the coding (in FORTH of all things). The Friday before Thanksgiving he said he was ready to order parts. Since we wouldn’t be doing much the next week, I told him to wait until the Monday after Thanksgiving to order the parts (cash flow, cash flow, cash flow). On that fateful Monday he placed the order for 100 of the microcontrollers. Newark told him they were out of stock and that all production for the next few months was on allocation. He tried all of the other vendors that we used regularly and a few that we did not. The single unit pricing was around $35 and in lots of 100 they had been $28 or so. They jumped to over $100, but it didn’t matter because they were unobtainium. This almost put me out of business. We later found out that Chrysler had purchased all of the stock and all of the production for many months.
we were taught 6800 in our high school back in 2010/11, I was so hyped up already because I knew how to program PICs before and the 6800 was so much flexible. never thought the 68HC11 and similar MCUs were cool, for some reason PICs were cheaper over here, and you could do the same stuff with them than the HC11s. Nowdays, I've played with 8051s, 8085, 8086, 80186, z80 and z180 sbcs but never with a 6800 or 68k. I should rectify that :)
Thanks for continuing this- I was worried in 8 minutes you wouldn't start to scratch setting it up- I was hoping you would breakout a breadboard and start putting together a system from scratch! :P
I spent quite a bit of time learning about these chips, they were used (housemarked) on Connor hard drives and they had a built in diagnostic terminal for testing the HDDs, they were also used on Andros gas analysers so I've got a *lot* of the chips in the PLCC package but also the unusual sized DIP package. Fun thing, a lot of them had the Buffalo bootloader built in so you could get one up and running real easily without needing an EPROM programmer, they're real advanced for the day and would probably still be a lot of fun to play with. .
I have designed a lot of circuits around 68HC11 since 1989. It is really easy cpu to apply although you will need a fair amount of external chips to make it useful. Its bus is multiplexed which means the address and data bytes come out one byte at a time. I found a nasty bug in it regarding the control line timing. A certain line must be logically combined with another to really make it work. Else the data is not valid in all conditions. Another bug is in the version made by Toshiba. The PA7 line refuses to act as a full I/O as specified.
I've got a Moto branded dev board for a 68HC11 somewhere. Anout the siae of a sheet of paper. Databook for the dev board too. Almost want to drag it out but not enough to dig dor it. It is probable next to the 8052-BASIC board. Used a personal word peocessor with a serial port and a daisy wheel printer to talk to them. Still have a HC11 3.25 floppy in the baxk of my 35 year old computer desk. Damn. I need a drink or three....
The HC16 is much more developed. It has some really exceptional features integrated in it, like programmable chip selects for SPI and some extremely powerful signal processing commands on the ASM level. It is also much faster and has some memory and what is really good, is that its memory space is really wide allowing use of megabyte level chips for large programs
I would be interested to learn more about your professional background if youd ever be up for sharing. (Or point me to that video, i couldn't find such)
5:18 I first learned machine code over 40 years ago on a 6802 board with a hex keyboard and 6-digit LED display, and I still immediately go "SoftWare Interrupt!" whenever I see "3F".
I still have my senior design project robot based on the 68HC11 from 1990. It was a two wheeled robot using a base from the Radio Shack Robi?JR. It had two cadmium light sensors each in a BIC pen cap for shielding and interfaced to the ultrasonic sensors again from the Robi. 7.2 Nicad with battery monitoring. All wired wrapped lol. Anyway, it was programmed to scan the room, using the front facing cadmium light sensor for dark areas, and move toward the darkest place. Then it would check if it was under a table using the cadmium sensor looking up. After a few minutes it would search the room for another hiding place. It continued this behavior until the batteries were low and activate the ultrasonic sensors to look for the remote ultrasonic beacon, which was always transmitting from a custom circular charging base, a round 12” double sided copper plated circuit board on a metal base. Top negative, bottom positive. It could approach from any angle except where the wires connected. The bot had a custom charge connector using three tempered long connectors in a triangle pattern. Think middle finger top and two fingers bottom. Anyway it could find the charger anywhere within a 12’ distance, approach the base, dock and snuggle to get a good connection until charged and leave to find a new hiding place. It would repeat this behavior for hours. Fun to watch and learned a lot. It sits on a shelf now as a distant memory. I still have the developer kit 😊. Thank you from Central Florida 🌴🇺🇸
Seen it in old NMT cellphones and in SUN keyboards, among other places. Also got Ericsson 10MHz reference for NMT base station having one. Indeed, not in cheap things, but in high end stuff.
I'm quite fond of the earlier microcontrollers, MC6801 and MC6803 (ROM and no ROM), where the ROM part can be strapped to hide the ROM. They sit between the MC6800 and 68HC11, and have excellent Hitachi clones (HD6301/HD6303) with some added instructions of their own.
2010's models still have more or less the same features as this oldie - just more ram and flash. Thought they would've changed more stuff over such a long life
Used 68HC11F1 and A8 chips back in the '80s and '90s. They worked well and the on-chip I/O was powerful. I remember using the edge capture of the timers to implement 3 extra serial input ports. They had a neat "boot from serial" you could use for ROMless or debugging. Had a board with just a RAM chip and it booted off serial and downloaded the code to RAM.
All ASM code back in those days. Switched to Microchip PIC as they were cheaper and faster but coding was a bit harder.
ahhhhh, memories - my 1st microcontroller experience after some Z80-magic at university - I had a dev board with variant offering the Bootstrapping-Loader thingy where you could load stuff via RS232 into internal EEPROM/RAM for execution
In the early 1990’s my small company had designed three pieces of test equipment which all used a MC68HC11CFN2. I had one engineer beside myself and he was doing most of the coding (in FORTH of all things). The Friday before Thanksgiving he said he was ready to order parts. Since we wouldn’t be doing much the next week, I told him to wait until the Monday after Thanksgiving to order the parts (cash flow, cash flow, cash flow). On that fateful Monday he placed the order for 100 of the microcontrollers. Newark told him they were out of stock and that all production for the next few months was on allocation. He tried all of the other vendors that we used regularly and a few that we did not. The single unit pricing was around $35 and in lots of 100 they had been $28 or so. They jumped to over $100, but it didn’t matter because they were unobtainium. This almost put me out of business. We later found out that Chrysler had purchased all of the stock and all of the production for many months.
we were taught 6800 in our high school back in 2010/11, I was so hyped up already because I knew how to program PICs before and the 6800 was so much flexible. never thought the 68HC11 and similar MCUs were cool, for some reason PICs were cheaper over here, and you could do the same stuff with them than the HC11s. Nowdays, I've played with 8051s, 8085, 8086, 80186, z80 and z180 sbcs but never with a 6800 or 68k. I should rectify that :)
Thanks for continuing this- I was worried in 8 minutes you wouldn't start to scratch setting it up- I was hoping you would breakout a breadboard and start putting together a system from scratch! :P
I spent quite a bit of time learning about these chips, they were used (housemarked) on Connor hard drives and they had a built in diagnostic terminal for testing the HDDs, they were also used on Andros gas analysers so I've got a *lot* of the chips in the PLCC package but also the unusual sized DIP package.
Fun thing, a lot of them had the Buffalo bootloader built in so you could get one up and running real easily without needing an EPROM programmer, they're real advanced for the day and would probably still be a lot of fun to play with.
.
Funny enough there's a whole class at my school dedicated to learning the assembly of this microcontroller and oh my god was it an absolute nightmare
Pretty much the only place that has these left is Rochester Electronics.
I have designed a lot of circuits around 68HC11 since 1989. It is really easy cpu to apply although you will need a fair amount of external chips to make it useful. Its bus is multiplexed which means the address and data bytes come out one byte at a time. I found a nasty bug in it regarding the control line timing. A certain line must be logically combined with another to really make it work. Else the data is not valid in all conditions. Another bug is in the version made by Toshiba. The PA7 line refuses to act as a full I/O as specified.
I've got a Moto branded dev board for a 68HC11 somewhere. Anout the siae of a sheet of paper. Databook for the dev board too. Almost want to drag it out but not enough to dig dor it. It is probable next to the 8052-BASIC board. Used a personal word peocessor with a serial port and a daisy wheel printer to talk to them. Still have a HC11 3.25 floppy in the baxk of my 35 year old computer desk. Damn. I need a drink or three....
I think the first development board I purchased was the 68HC16, pretty basic stuff but its the same part.
The HC16 is much more developed. It has some really exceptional features integrated in it, like programmable chip selects for SPI and some extremely powerful signal processing commands on the ASM level. It is also much faster and has some memory and what is really good, is that its memory space is really wide allowing use of megabyte level chips for large programs
Is it an IMSAI ? I still don't know what one is despite watching your channel for ages !
watch from the beginning: ua-cam.com/video/DLFIBQ1WlmU/v-deo.htmlsi=Qd4Y54TMUfZBHQpr
@@IMSAIGuy Ok now I get it, should have done this a while back ! you talk more about IMSAI Dog nowadays ! :)
HeathKit Computer?
I would be interested to learn more about your professional background if youd ever be up for sharing. (Or point me to that video, i couldn't find such)
ua-cam.com/video/x3IPtBzxAgE/v-deo.htmlsi=jBFAqo-C1D_YZuuK