Project:Infotec displays

Donated by Nottinghack, who have a project page with pictures. Further information posted by NortHACKton and Leeds.

Status

The screen on one side has been damaged and a roughyl 10x10 pixel area is dead.

Works fine apart from that.

We need to work out how to talk to it.

Update : we can send the time to it via the serial port, but don't yet know how to format the other commands.

Hardware

Photos by Akki

Notes

Mark has done some work on the dumped rom, including extracting the fonts at Tom's suggestion:

https://github.com/marksteward/Infotec/

The command

>PR#0#00#00,07,08#25,05,2012,2#3D<

sent at 9600 baud sets the time to 00:07:08 (and, presumably, the calendar to 25/5/12 though we don't know how to display that at the moment). The tailing 3D is a checksum - the 2-digit hex representation of the XOR of all previous characters, starting with the '>'.

The clock seems to initially set itself up for 19200 baud serial port but later in the initialisation changes it to 9600.

Turning on DIP switch 8 and cycling power puts the clock in a display test mode.

Firmware

NEC 27 (25), which is almost identical to a 186, with register bank switching, DMA and a simple buffering (macro) system for interrupts. User manual and with opcodes and with chart.

External bus	8-bit
Clock speed	8MHz?
DMA channels	2
Serial	built-in
Timers	2
Internal data area	256 bytes based at xxe00
Special functions	256 bytes based at xxf00

Disassembly at http://github.com/marksteward/Infotec/.