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A single-board ZX Spectrum with the keyboard silk-screened in color right onto the circuit board [1]

['Rob Beschizza']

Date: 2024-06-19  

The tiny and inexpensive ESP32 microcontroller is useful for many things, but Chris Greening made something truly magical with it: a ZX Spectrum that implements that computer's famously troublesome keyboard as conductive traces on a screen-printed circuit board. "I've made something cool!" he says, accurately.

It's an ESP32-S3 based PCB. I really wanted to try out the full color silk screen printing capabilities of PCBWay and it's come out even better than I expected. The keys on the keyboard are all capacitive touch pads – so they are just copper pads on the PCB. With the S3 we've got up to 14 touch pads and the ZX Spectrum keyboard uses 8 rows with 5 columns in each row for its keyboard. …

It's not quite ready for production yet, but if there's enough interest I will do a production run and put it on sale. If you're interested then sign up here to get progress updates: https://atomic14.com/esp32spectrum

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[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2024/06/19/a-single-board-zx-spectrum-with-the-keyboard-silk-screened-in-color-right-onto-the-circuit-board.html

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