Zyklus-MPS

I want to introduce our user PaulMC a bit. This gentleman has been responsible for a lot of the succeses we’ve had. He took the schematics and created new PCB layouts and basically nailed them in the first try. Then he surprised us with a completely redesigned modern power supply, suitable as a drop-in replacement. […]

This gentleman (https://microcorelabs.wordpress.com/) has created a Z80 Emulator, based on a Teensy 4.1 module. It is supposed to be a drop-in replacement for the cpu, with which we can use its features to easilly develop new features for the Zyklus. Using this emulator would negate the need to burn new EPROMS, as we can simply […]

I’m trying to think of ways to deal with the software. My thoughts for now are to create a hardware abstraction layer with API’s that the software can interact with. By decoupling the logic from the hardware, it should theoretically be easier to develop new functions. And to simulate these. Not sure yet how I’m […]

It’s been a while – I’ve been a bit busy. But here we go. A new Zyklus is born. Actually, quite a while ago, User PaulMc and myself managed to finsih building the first version of the mainboard. While there were one or two little bugs, it ended up working quite nicely! So with that, […]

It’s been a while, but there was a lot of progress. All the boards have now been built. The powersupply board works as should. There was an issue with the voltage regulator being not strong enough (1.5A), so it’s been replaced with a 2A variant and now it works nicely. It gets hot though. The […]

So after spending some time debugging and not getting why the new button panel board didn’t work, as it measssured exactly how it should following the schematics, and after basically replacing every TTL chip (I did find some dodgy ones), it was time to start comparing it to the original and soon enough the issue […]

We have a great little community going in the discord server. One user, PaulMC, has created the KiCad files for the 3 PCB’s and had a first run printed. We’re trying to build these. I’ve started with the button panel PCB:    

It took a fair bit of time to get to this point, but here we are.. Going step by step to the various repairs. First off was the encoder. This one was pretty much completley stuck, but with some grease it started moving again. Not fluent enough though to keep, so I replaced it with […]

Things are getting a bit crazy, as a second Zyklus has shown up at my door. Actually, this machine was Pete’s and suffered moisture damage. It was considered dead, but recently it actually did show some signs of life. Given the rarity, all the more reason to refurbish. Besides that,  now I can use this […]