> > We are also developing a RFID card to unlock/lock the machine (still > > experimental, and we are going to use an old 68HC11 board for this ... > > it's 80s technology) > > Are you developing your own technology? Or are you re-using standard > technology that's been around for a while?
our own technology. RFID at 125Khz. We already have a prototype. A good occasion to play with analogic electronics and also a good occasion to use ICC11 v6.5 on a HC11 board, and ICC11 was a good C compiler in the 90s. (we are also supporting gcc-11, but it's ... not so good) > I think Sun (and others) had X terminals that had smart card slots in > them. This sounds functionally quite similar, just a few substitutions. yup, SunRay uses a smart-card, but it's not contactless, and it's a true-smart card, whose protocol looks not so funny to play with (except if you are paid for doing it). SmartCards are safer anyway We want to use RFID Smartcard-shaped cards. The looks like a credit card, but they have an RFID capsule inside. Therefore we only need a coil to read it. Simply, and funny. this (1) a commercial product you can use as a reference ... the chip is a common avr8 (1) http://www.downthebunker.xyz/wonderland/chunk_of/stuff/public/projects/sonoko-x11/rfid/hz1050/ > That in and of itself does not make what you're doing bad or a waste of > time IMHO if you're having fun (other than injuries), learning, reducing > ewaste by reusing things you have, well that all sounds good to me. Precisely! We neither have a CNC, nor a 3D printer, and we want to recycle polycarbonate frames. We got a lot of industrial waste. It would be a shame trashing them. > I was sort of asking because part of me would like to build something > that looks like a DEC vt420 with a look alike (but physically smaller) > case with an LCD (?) display. I've thought about running a Pi and > running XTerm. But that's a pipe dream project for some other time. it can be done easily. Our boards run U-BOOT as firmware, and Linux as the kernel. On your RPI you just need to manage a custom kernel on a custom rootfs. There is a Dude on the internet offering a small Indigo1 case with a LinuxBoard inside. It's a cool project. The case is 3D printed. The only "tricky" part is setting the builder. We chose catalyst because we also support Gentoo on MIPS4, MIPS32, HPPA2, PPCBE, thus it's a "natural" choice, but there are also builders like Angstrom and OpenWRT which allow you to have ucLibc and similar. We are using glibc just for our convenience (since we already have a working and tested glibc-profile) Anyway, we'd like to have a nice WindowsManager. We are using "mwm" which is super light and very classic (my Tektronix XP217 uses it), but we are going to evaluate "fvwm": it seems it's light but offering good "visual features"; we'd like to reconfigure it with the look&feel of 4DWM (SGI IRIX) ... maybe it's possible, who knows :D
