I’ve had a couple of Post Office failed-delivery slips kicking around for several weeks now. The place closes at six, so it’s nearly impossible to get there without making special efforts to rearrange my schedule. Having no idea what this package was, or who it was from, or why I should care about it, the errand just hadn’t seemed that important. Well, this morning I managed to scoot out of the house early, stop by the post office, and pick up these mysterious packages. It was just one package, which they’d tried to deliver it twice; a little tan envelope, addressed from Sofia, in Bulgaria. What on earth? I don’t know anyone in Bulgaria; why is someone sending me a tiny lumpy package which requires signature confirmation?
Turns out it is a pair of FND500 LED displays, which I apparently bought on eBay late one September evening. I really like FND500s; they haven’t been made since the mid-80s, and they light up with a gorgeous deep red semi-translucent glow. They’re not so great for long-distance readability but they look beautiful. I inherited a handful of them from an older electronics hacker’s stash, and bought another couple dozen on eBay once I found out how awesome they were – I periodically check eBay for more but had completely forgotten that I’d actually ordered any.
FND500’s are great little devices. I’ve used them on many projects too. I think the more memorable, was a z80 system I built with my own “OS”, so that it was able to initialise a UART, display good (couldn’t make it display Ready without the R and A looking the same) and jump to an address to start executing programs I’d put into an eeprom.
Awesome fun to build, the part I enjoyed the most was getting it to talk to the PC via the serial bus, so that I could burn new code to the eeprom. It made the hex keyboard redundant and saved a lot of figuring out!
I had many plans for the project, then discovered PIC’s instead.
Comment by Andy — October 19, 2010 @ 3:15 am