Alright, then. I will try not to flood the group with it. This sort of
thing doesn't seem to grab a lot of interest, so I kinda hesitate to
share my projects. And of course there is the embarrassment of getting
side-tracked and not finishing them!
Most of the stuff is just simple things that can be accomplished in a
weekend. But really small projects like using the cassette relay are
bite-size projects people can do to just play around.
Just hooking up an Arduino to the serial port opens up a whole world of
experiments.
But that is sort of "cheating". Getting more familiar with the hardware
and programming means trying to use the built-in hardware as much as
possible.
On my list at the moment:
1. Bidirectional printer port mod
2. Frontlight. My latest M100 actually has a chip missing of the
reflective back coating making it look like it might not be such a
terrible job of removing it all and installing a backlight.
Interestingly, I can still see the text even over the chip even though I
can see through it. I have some parts to experiment with several
methods. I am a coward to try to remove the reflective coating as there
is no return if I mess it up.
3. 8 and 16 relay. More just for fun. I guess it might come in handy for
a a neat experiment in controlling a Halloween display or lightshow with
the M100. A little late for Halloween, though.
4. Instrument control. A GPIB interface would be pretty neat. Looking at
instrument data on the M100 would be cool.
5. Speech. I have some Votrax chips which are easy to interface with
parallel ports. But those are incredibly expensive now when they can be
found. The General Instruments SP0256-AL can be had a bit cheaper. Also
fairly easy to interface.
6. Covox speech thing. This was a parallel port sound card for the PC.
It was nothing more than a resistor ladder DAC that could create some
impressive sound. It would be interesting to experiment and see what the
M100 could do with it.
7. Robot Arms. I have various robot arms. One of them is a Minimover 5
that was originally designed for a TRS-80 model I, but a few jumpers
converted it to parallel port use.
8. Motor controller (for the spectravideo robotarms and a Milton Bradley
Robotix controller)
9. Fishertechnik model controller. This one is probably moderately
simple. Mostly a software project.
10. Internal WiFi modem
11. Wireless serial
12. Joystick
13. Internal TPDD2 drive emulator
14. Full size LCD display - I found soem 10" monochrome LCDs in cheap
surplus and realized they would be perfect for the M100. They are about
the same size so it could be made into an attachable cover like a laptop.
Ken demonstrated using the MVT100 for video output:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkqcmGkUxGs
I believe something similar could also be done with the FABGL VGA32
(although sourcing one of those is difficult at the moment)
And now some case ideas have been added due to recent discussions. lol
On 10/18/2025 5:04 PM, Andrew Ayers wrote:
Scott, I'd be interested in learning about these expansion options you
are working on; while I haven't done much of anything with my
M100s...someday I hope to, and expansion of such nature would be a
part of that, hopefully.
Andrew L. Ayers
Glendale, Arizona
phoenixgarage.org
github.com/andrew-ayers
