In the parts bins that I acquired long ago, four of the many ICs in one of the bins were Z80 microprocessors. At the time, I thought it would be neat to try to do something with them, but had no time and no levels in low level hardware design.
Fast forward to post-PhD time and inspired by Ben Eater‘s 8-bit CPU and 6502 projects and videos, I learned enough about microprocessors and what connections to make with them to try doing something with the Z80. YouTube also presented me with a variety of Z80 related videos to watch. This one by Julian Ilett was one I found particularly informative.
The date codes on the Z80 chips indicates they’re 1987-1988 era chips, and not knowing how they were stored before I got them, I had no idea if any of them even worked. Grabbed one of the Z80 chips, plunked it into a breadboard and started wiring it up.
Off in the corner of the breadboard is a 555 set up as an astable oscillator and functions as the clock for the Z80. The clock goes runs between 6 – 475 Hz depending on the potentiometer setting.
After getting things wired up and applying power, some LEDs would light up, but then all the address bus LEDs would blink on and off but not in the expected binary counting pattern. Seemed like I had everything wired up correctly.
After studying Julian’s video and wiring some more, I tried triggering the reset pin and boom! LEDs blinked off, then came back on and the address bus LEDs started the expected binary counting pattern! Yay, it worked! Added a button for the reset pin to make resetting the Z80 easier.
Getting this going was fun, and a good learning experience. Gained a few XPs.
What next? Well, I could continue on and try to add enough to make a functional computer out of the Z80 and following the techniques in Ben’s 6502 video series. I’ll definitely need some more breadboards, and a few more components. I’ve got a few RAM chips I could try, but no idea of any of them actually work.
It’s kind of cool just turning it on and watching the LEDs blink though.
Making a breadboard based Z80 computer would be a fun project.
Discover more from Imablog
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.