Reviving a SmartBox microcontroller from the 1990s #VintageComputing #Education @benryves
The Economatics SmartBox was a general purpose control interface that was used with a variety of computers in education in the early 1990s. The Smart Box was designed to work with “SmartMove” software for MS-DOS, RISC OS and C#/WinForms. Ben Ryves posts:
When I was at school in the 1990s one of the devices that got me into microcontrollers in the first place was a computer control system based around the Economatics SmartBox. This plugs into a computer via a serial connection, has eight simple digital inputs, eight simple digital outputs, four analogue inputs and four motor drivers. Programs could be written in a BASIC-like language or in flowchart form, and once you’d run and tested them on the SmartBox you could program them to a PIC microcontroller to run without the host computer.
Inside there’s a 65C02 CPU inside along with 32KB of RAM and the OS runs from a socketed 8KB ROM.
With DOSBox-X, Ben was able to get the software running and with a necessary serial port.
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