I must extend a big “Thank You!” to Lewin Day at Hackaday for this excellent Mega IIe write-up. Accompanying the post is an archived recording of my Supercon 2023 talk. That talk is where I gave a complete overview of the Mega IIe project and showed off the final case design for the first time! This project is where I took the Mega-II chip out of an Apple IIGS and built a fully compatible Apple IIe around it—something that not even Apple ever did!
I created a Wi-Fi-enabled LED Detector using Nordic’s nRF7002 Design Kit (DK). Using this box, I can detect when LEDs on appliances, like my lab’s dehumidifier, are on. In other words, my non-IoT tool can send me messages over the Internet now! And, because the nRF7002 has a dual-band Wi-Fi antenna, it does so on my 5 GHz network.
The Apple II’s CPU clock has jitter or a glitch. This issue is not new—it has been present since its original design in 1977! Bald Engineer uses an oscilloscope to show how often the glitch occurs and how to correlate that jitter to its source—which is useful when you are not testing 40-year-old devices. The device under test (DUT) in this video is the Mega IIe project. It’s a fully compatible Apple IIe built around the Mega II chip.
During the component shortage, I got to know Raspberry Pi’s RP2040 microcontroller. It is a dual-core Arm Cortex-M0+ with about 262 kilobytes of RAM. The feature I like most is the programmable IO pins. These are small state machines that run independently of the Arm cores. They allow for some clever tricks. For example, I used them extensively on the Mega IIe project.
These links accompany the Mega IIe presentation at Supercon 2023.
