Of course! Total mental blackout on my part.
There are even DIY kits that could be fitted into a custom 3D printed stand.
On 10/1/2025 7:33 AM, Justin Poirier wrote:
No comment on the other hardware, but I will comment on the battery
possibilities. These machines will gladly run on the 5V that a portable
USB battery bank puts out. I have made many USB-to-DC barrel connectors
to run my 102 and 200s on the go. Not only do you get the power density
of lithium chemistry, but you also get the pack's built-in charge
controller so you can just plug it in and recharge it like anything
else that charges via USB. Some battery backs support pass-through
charging as well so they can supply power while being charged. (This is
not always the case, and not often advertised as a feature so you may
have to test a few different battery packs to find one that supports
this.)
Find a good battery bank and then 3-D print the supports and legs to
make it a good fit for tilting the machine (maybe velco would be fine
to make it easily removable) and you're done from an electrical
perspective.
--Justin
On Tue, 2025-09-30 at 18:49 -0400, Scott McDonnell wrote:
I plan to dedicate one of my Model 100s to use as a controller for my
80s robots.
These are my planned mods to implement this:
1. Internal retro wifi modem (oldnet.com)
I plan to make hack onto the MC14412 chip. I have no plan to
retain the original modem functionality, but if I did, I am thinking
I
could implement this via the modem enable signal. That would also
allow
me to control power to the ESP8266 so that it did not drain the
battery
when not in use. I could bring the enable line out to a switch to
reconnect the enable line to the MC14412. At the moment, I can't
really
think of why I might ever want the original modem.
I will use a Wemos D1 mini with an external antenna that I will
attach
to the M100 body.
2. Complete my originally idea to port the TPDDuino project to the
sparkfun openlog hardware and make this internal
Here, I am thinking the BCR TTL serial mod would be appropriate.
This frees up the serial port which I will need for the robot
control.
Not sure if TSDOS already supports this, however. There could could
be
some benefits to the faster speed possible with the BCR hack.
3. Wireless serial
For this, I have not decided whether to use bluetooth or an HC-
12
module. This will be in an external modules so that I can use the
serial
port for other purposes. I do plan to add a fused 5V output to pin 25
of
the serial port. This was a common pin to use back in the day for
adding
a power output. It doesn't appear to be connected to ground in the
M100
per the schematics, but I will need to double-check.
4. Joystick mod mentioned previously
If I will be using the BCR port for the TPPDuino, then I will
end
up implementing the ideas discussed in that thread for using the
parallel port. But I also might just hack into the keyboard matrix
arrows since this will be dedicated for this purpose. Still weighing
this while I work on the other mods.
-----------------------
Interested in internal battery hacks. I have been thinking of
installing
a 7.2V nimh pack. I am not really sure it could fit anywhere inside,
though.
While looking through old magazines, I had seen products that were
available at the time which were battery packs that also doubled as
tilt
stands. I liked the look of those and might end up 3-D printing
something like that. There was a simpler project to use a PVC pipe
with
D cell batteries and the author fashioned that to also act as a tilt
stand.
For my first M100, I had modified a book light to attach to the BCR
port
to provide light for the LCD. I wasn't especially happy with it as
the
clear plastic bezel is too glossy and reflected too much of the
light. I
feel like if there were any possible enhancement here, it would need
to
be some sort of front light mounted internally. This is probably
outside
of how much effort I want to put into this.
Interested in hearing about any experience and efforts into trying to
improve the readability of the LCD.
