This is a complex project involving 3D printing and soldering as well as software. Alr will take care of the software dependencies for you, but you will have to read the README and documentation to find the other parts.

This project is intended to replicate the look and feel of older computers with the switches and lights. It uses the simulators from bbs_simcpu to drive the LEDs and act on the switches. Using the Intel 8080 simulator, I was actually able to toggle a bootstrap program in using the panel and get it to boot CP/M. If you use the Motorola 68000 simulator, it will load and run a simple multitasking OS. The example simulator can be used to flash the lights in a variaty of ways.

There is a lamp test program in the lamp-test directory that may be useful for debugging the hardware.

Note that since each cycle of the simulator involves multiple I2C bus transactions to read switches and set LEDs, any CPU simulation will run rather slowly. The intention of this project is more for display than simulator usage.

There is also a web server that can be used to select the CPU variant. This is most useful with the example simulator to select the light pattern.

This project run on a Raspberry Pi. It will build on most Unix or Unix-like systems, but unless the hardware interface matches the Raspberry Pi, it won’t run. You are welcome to try porting it to other systems, if you like.