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Ideas for the Kaypro

2020-12-04 17:44 PST

kaypro stuff

The Kaypro has a pair of a floppy drives and I'm thinking I'd like to figure out how to emulate them over an SD card. I figure I could use an ATmega or something similar to take over the I/O lines, maybe add in a small LCD display to show the active drives. A lot of people seem to use CF drives, but it's getting hard to find quality CF cards and from my experience with the RC2014 the CF card is responsible for all the ATA emulation. The SC131 kit uses an SD card, so maybe I can check that out to see if I can figure something out with that.

I found the Kaypro technical manual (that covers all the models as of 1984) on Bitsavers and that has all the schematics. I think I'm going to print this off and put it in a binder. I saw a similar project on Hackaday but the project pages seem to have disappeared.

I think the ATmega328 won't have enough I/O pins, so I'll probably have to bump it up (I forget the model number right now, I'll have to look it up). At the very least, I'll probably need a custom board to handle the I/O lines. I bet there's an SD card hat I can use, and interfacing a serial LCD shouldn't be hard.

netbook stuff

I wanted to hack later at night, which means reducing the console brightness. The issue with that is that xbacklight doesn't support my netbook:



kyle@wntrmute:~$ xbacklight 
No outputs have backlight property

Well, I ran into this a while ago so I wrote a little tool in C to deal with it, consbri (console brightness), that uses Linux's sysfs to manage the backlight's brightness. I haven't touched it since January 2013 [a], so I cloned it and the code was broken right out of the box.

It was autoconf based, so that's a lot of overhead for something that only works on Linux.
The code didn't even compile. Apparently, some autocomplete got me and renamed read_brightness as read_brightnights.
There was a logic error, where the current brightness and max brightness were swapped.

Basically, the code as it was on Github never ran - maybe I fixed it locally and never updated it, maybe I abandoned it, I forget. Anyways, I got it fixed up, switched it over to cskel, and switched over to scdoc.

consbri source

cskel (subdirectory in this tree)

scdoc home

With that out of the way, I moved on to some other stuff. I'm a maintainer of surfraw, which I've been doing for quite a while, and it's high time I got back to using it regularly.

https://gitlab.com/surfraw/surfraw

Thinking about more ways to shift to more offline-first.

[a] I did say it was a while ago.