On Sep 5, 2007, at 4:10 PM, Brent Hilpert wrote:
I received two orphan 320K keyboard/display units a few years ago
(no logic unit).
Hobbled up a little level-shifting hardware and wrote some
calculator code to
drive them from a SWTPC 6800 - in other words the 6800 was
replacing the
missing logic unit. Worked fine but the next (intended) step was to
redo it
all in a microcontroller and stuff it inside the 320K case so it
would be a
stand-alone 'modern' nixie desktop calculator. Would be kinda nice
because the
320K KDUs have a small footprint compared to other nixie desktop
calcs. There
is very little spare room in the case however. I think I
anticipated it would be
feasible if one used an external wal-wart (ugly) for the power
transformer.
The KDUs are very well built: cast aluminum case, micro-switches
for the keys...
Cool idea. Did you find the hardware interface documented somewhere,
or did you reverse engineer it somehow? Was it something standard
like RS-232?