I put together my z80 kit last weekend and didn't get a chance to write about it until now.

The kit is a Southern Cross, and I'm very pleased with it. Although the instructions weren't great, they really didn't need to be - I didn't find myself looking at them much. If you know how to solder, and how to identify electronic components, the kit is fairly straightforward.

Some photos:











And a movie of it running a test program.

The aluminium foil on the table is just to stop solder splats from doing too much damage (the table is plastic).

I didn't put together the serial port yet - leaving that for another day. It looks very simple though - probably only about ten minutes work.

Only a couple of small things tripped me up a bit: The instructions say the kit should beep when you switch it on, but it doesn't. I thought I'd maybe miss-soldered something around the buzzer, but it actually doesn't beep until you do something. No big deal. The other thing that made me think something was wrong is that the kit actually takes a while to boot up. Although the LEDs light up almost instantly, it takes about ten seconds for the keypad to become responsive. Again, no big deal - just made me waste a little time checking and re-checking things that I wouldn't have needed to if I knew about it.

It's a lot of fun keying in the hex opcodes for an assembly program, and incrementing the address pointer one byte at a time. Very cool kit. I'm looking forward to finding some time to get the serial port up and writing a Lisp system for it.