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These days I'm far from mine “lab” so I took the opportunity to bring forward another toy, this time based on a common ESP32-WROOM-32 module.
In fact, I was curious to try the bookstores FabGl for ESP32 which allows, Moreover, to create a classic RS232 terminal (it can actually do a lot more…) with color graphics, mouse and sound management.
To make everything easy to assemble, I only used TH components (with the exception of the ESP32 module of course) in order to also facilitate the possible creation of a kit.
For the sounds I have provided a simple amplifier based on an inexpensive LM386 to be able to directly connect a common PC speaker.Here a first attempt at placing (without routing):
Admirable!
But it would not be possible to read SD cards?
I would say it could be very close to a Raspberry, therefore with an SO.Lately I have had time to take the uTerm2-S PCB and complete it. I shrunk the PCB a bit, the final board is now 90mm x 95mm:
@Picmicro675: Yup, you could add a microSD but as this is basically a terminal I preferred to avoid in order not to complicate the card. Maybe in the future I will make another version with microSD and more in order to have a kind of PC, but in this case I will only use SMD components.Now all that remains is to wait for the manufacture…
Long live the back, but as you can understand nowadays everything in SMT. What then if we look at the age I would say that it has passed i 30 years even with the SMT. I don't venture much on that method, I already have difficulty with the step from 1/10 of inch. I tried a couple of experiments and missed the components that are smaller than bread crumbs 🙂
I started the first tests of the board. Here is a test of the audio part:
And this is the VGA video part with the terminal settings panel (FabGl bookcase):
While I was testing the card, I couldn't help but install the famous Space Invaders game on it, also inside the FabGl library:
I must say that together with the audio effects it recreates the atmosphere of the arcades of the period very well!
In the meantime I realized that in fact it would be possible to add a microSD card and a PSRAM using the AUX connector just above the ESP32 module, so i tried to draw a small PCB from “mount above” and that I have not by chance called uHat (micro hat, or micro hat). We'll see…
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