Ben Eater 6502 with OneRom (from piers rocks)

 I've been watching Ben Eater's Videos for a while.  And I thought I would give it a try so I bought one of his kits.  It has been a delightfully rewarding experience.  I was cautious at first about doing it all on a breadboard.  I found his Breadboarding tips helpful.  I probably should have rewatched this one first.  To debug things I ended up buying a Mega 2560 Arduino which has been invaluable.

However I did NOT end up buying and EEPROM programmer. Instead I bought a 28pin One ROM and I'm so glad I did.  This means I can program directly from inside of VS Code with a small change to my Makefile,  $ make program will build and program the ROM in-circuit.  No more digging the chip out of the breadboard and disturbing the existing address and data lines nearby.  The only gotcha is that after programming I need to power cycle the entire board. Dropping the reset line is not enough as the One ROM will return all zeros until it is power cycled.   Yes I am aware of $ onerom reboot, but for some reason it doesn't work on my model.  However having to toggle a single button my power supply after running make program is still way easier than having to remove the ROM every single time.  I would highly recommend it.  You'll find videos about One ROM at piers rocks channel.

So far the OneROM has worked great.  Even running at 2MHz with RAM, VIA and ACIA chips sharing the bus.  The OneROM works awesome and I would highly recommend it for any new 6502 builds.  (Not just legacy systems).  In theory one could even attach a pin to one of the jumpers on the top and provide a small amount of ram to a different address space and then forgo having to attach a 62256 RAM chip.  I haven't tried this feature yet, but I would be interested in hearing other's experiences.

 -Aaron

VLAN on MikroTik routers

 Recently I started converting my MikroTik routers to use VLAN's instead of each switch being on a single subnet.  Below are some things I discovered.

1. MikroTik devices are a bit more complicated to setup VLAN's on versus other vendors such as Ubiquiti.  Some of this is because different models have different procedures.

2. At least on a CRS112, every VLAN must have a Trunk port.  I tried several different trunkless configurations and I was unable to get the switch to route between ports on a trunkless VLAN.

3. On a Hybrid port (a port that has both tagged and untagged VLAN traffic on the same port) when you set the ingress-vlan-translation for the untagged VLAN, make sure to include customer-vid=0 when setting the new-customer-vid.  If you don't include this condition then tagged traffic will get accidentally routed to the untagged VLAN.  I was at first surprised by this but this makes sense the more I think about it.

Bed Adhesion is important to prevent spaghetti

 If the pieces fall over mid print, don't forget to try some glue-stick.

Time Lapse:

Printing with "Supports for PLA" filament using Bambu's AMS

Recently I 3D printed some parts that needed supports.

How you orient the piece and how you do the supports matters a lot.

Attempt #1:

With the finished surface pointed up, I tried enabling supports the default way. I'm using PLA+ which is a bit stiffer and has better layer adhesion than PLA.

It printed fast and produced a high quality top finish:

However removing the support material took me more than an hour and where the supports were ended up looking bad afterwards. Also it was hard to determine where the part ended and the support began, so I accidentally chiseled off some of the actual part:

Attempt #2:

I tried flipping the part over with the front cover outside face on the textured print bed.

I also tried enabling Bambu's Support for PLA filament at the interface layer:

This special filament material is designed to not stick as well to PLA.

Note that we're not printing the entire support with the second filament. We're only using it on the interface. This uses way less of this filament and relies more on the bulk filament I'm already leveraging. After changing the support interface filament, it prompted and I also accepted these changes:

When using support material for the support interface, We recommend the following settings:

• 0 to z distance
• 0 interface spacing
• interlaced rectilinear pattern
• disable independent support layer height

This resulted in a much better experience in removing the supports:

Although the place where the supports were is still a bit rough.  (see middle section)

Unfortunately this is where fingers will be touching when operating the device I'm printing the shell for. So I still need to re-do the print as the front is not satisfactory to the touch.

Followup:

To achieve the result I am looking for, the rough edge of the support interface will be on the inside of the part where nobody has to touch it.  However I will definitely be utilizing the Support for PLA material at the interface layer to make my life easier when removing supports.

Update:

You might also find this article about Support settings in Bambu Studio.

Grocery Store Key Duplication #KeyMe #Kwikset #KW1

For fun I did a web search for locksmiths in my area and most of the results were at grocery stores. So I decided to visit one as you can see below. 

While this was not a proper locksmith (eg for servicing and rekeying locks) it does advertise to be able to duplicate keys.

Many know that Kwikset (KW1) and Schlage (SC1) are the most common residential blanks for North America.

So I thought I would give it a try.  Here you can see me provide a KW1 key to duplicate.  (And no, this does not open my house.)

Imagine my surprise that the machine then tries to upsell the transaction indicating how rare the key is.  "This is a Less Common Key."  And it indicated "most locksmiths" would not carry it.   And yet the machine is perfectly happy to ask for additional money to continue duplication.

For those less familiar every locksmith that provides residential duplication will have KW1 & SC1 blanks. This machine appears simply appears to doing a pure upsell.

If you are a locksmith, please tell me, wouldn't you stock KW1 blanks?

Let me know,

- Aaron

Simple TDR

I have a handful of RJ45 (ethernet wires) that are electrically questionable.  Rather than plugging each between a network device and an ethernet switch, I thought it might be better if use software to test the continuity for each of the wires.

I selected an unused Arduino for the hardware that had 16 free analog and/or digital pins free.  (Yes you can run Digital over Analog Arduino pins).  I wired up the first RJ45 jack to pins 2-9 and the second RJ45 jack to pins A0-A7.  If your Arduino doesn't have those pins, you can change the PORTS definition in the source code.

I ended up calling it simpletdr.  (It isn't actually a time domain reflectometer, its more of a high speed continuity checker, but if you remove the delay(1) in the code it will associate pairs instead of individual wires instead of just checking DC continuity).

You can find the code here on GitHub.  

C64 Shirt

My wife and I made a shirt.