Geek Project: Microprocessor Trainer

Here's a hobby electronics/computers education kit that I bought a couple years ago at a yard sale for $1.

It's a Science Fair kit that you wire up according to the instructions. It teaches how to understand and use commands for a little microprocessor that has some pre-programmed ROM in it. It has a small amount of RAM memory for coding in your own shtuff.

Allegedly, this microprocessor is a close relative of the ones that powered Speak-N-Spell children's toys.

This picture came out

s

i

d

e

w

a

y

s

.

It's a list of the commands that the microprocessor 'knows' you could say. It's quite complicated even to do simple things like adding numbers together.

Here are a couple pages from the text.

Daunting.

So far I understand how to take some data and add it to a register, and also how to display the contents.

This is a video of the program for a countdown timer. On the left you can see how many minutes are left in the countdown with the 3 left-most LEDs, in binary numbers, and then the next 4 show the tens column for the remaining seconds, in binary, and the digit on the right shows the ones column for remaining seconds.

Now give yourself 1,000 Geek Points if you can read binary coded numbers!