unlimitedbacon ♾️🥓Jun 15, 2023

A modern 3D printer being controlled by an ancient KayPro II. It's printing a G-Code file saved on the floppy disk!

@SamTornado and I did an incredible amount of work to get this going. It's connected to the printer via the serial. We also had to figure out how to connect the KayPro to a PC to copy the G-Code over.

Also wrote a custom program in Z80 assembly to stream the file to the printer.

All this to prove that we could have had home 3D printers in the 80s!

#3dprinting #retrocomputing

Show threadAxel HartmannJun 15, 2023
@unlimitedbacon @SamTornado - doesn't the 3D printer's microcontroller (Arduino based?) outperform the Z80?!?
Show threadunlimitedbacon ♾️🥓

@axel_hartmann @SamTornado Yah. They're both 8 bit CPUs, but iirc the Arduino is clocked higher.

Also there's a huge performance difference between reading/writing to floppy disks and flash memory.

Jun 15, 2023 at 6:47pmWeb