#2112

[@dthomason1630]

In the early 1990’s my small company had designed three pieces of test equipment which all used a MC68HC11CFN2. I had one engineer beside myself and he was doing most of the coding (in FORTH of all things). The Friday before Thanksgiving he said he was ready to order parts. Since we wouldn’t be doing much the next week, I told him to wait until the Monday after Thanksgiving to order the parts (cash flow, cash flow, cash flow). On that fateful Monday he placed the order for 100 of the microcontrollers. Newark told him they were out of stock and that all production for the next few months was on allocation. He tried all of the other vendors that we used regularly and a few that we did not. The single unit pricing was around $35 and in lots of 100 they had been $28 or so. They jumped to over $100, but it didn’t matter because they were unobtainium. This almost put me out of business. We later found out that Chrysler had purchased all of the stock and all of the production for many months.

[@JenkinsUSA]

I still have my senior design project robot based on the 68HC11 from 1990. It was a two wheeled robot using a base from the Radio Shack Robi?JR. It had two cadmium light sensors each in a BIC pen cap for shielding and interfaced to the ultrasonic sensors again from the Robi. 7.2 Nicad with battery monitoring. All wired wrapped lol. Anyway, it was programmed to scan the room, using the front facing cadmium light sensor for dark areas, and move toward the darkest place. Then it would check if it was under a table using the cadmium sensor looking up. After a few minutes it would search the room for another hiding place. It continued this behavior until the batteries were low and activate the ultrasonic sensors to look for the remote ultrasonic beacon, which was always transmitting from a custom circular charging base, a round 12” double sided copper plated circuit board on a metal base. Top negative, bottom positive. It could approach from any angle except where the wires connected. The bot had a custom charge connector using three tempered long connectors in a triangle pattern. Think middle finger top and two fingers bottom. Anyway it could find the charger anywhere within a 12’ distance, approach the base, dock and snuggle to get a good connection until charged and leave to find a new hiding place. It would repeat this behavior for hours. Fun to watch and learned a lot. It sits on a shelf now as a distant memory. I still have the developer kit 😊. Thank you from Central Florida 🌴🇺🇸

[@ScottHenion]

Used 68HC11F1 and A8 chips back in the '80s and '90s. They worked well and the on-chip I/O was powerful. I remember using the edge capture of the timers to implement 3 extra serial input ports. They had a neat "boot from serial" you could use for ROMless or debugging. Had a board with just a RAM chip and it booted off serial and downloaded the code to RAM. All ASM code back in those days. Switched to Microchip PIC as they were cheaper and faster but coding was a bit harder.

[@koenlefever]

5:18 I first learned machine code over 40 years ago on a 6802 board with a hex keyboard and 6-digit LED display, and I still immediately go "SoftWare Interrupt!" whenever I see "3F".

[@stephentrier5569]

I spent a decade developing embedded systems using the 68HC12, which was the 16-bit successor to the 68HC11. I liked it a lot; it was a pleasure to program in C or assembly.

[@TheTrashcutter]

ahhhhh, memories - my 1st microcontroller experience after some Z80-magic at university - I had a dev board with variant offering the Bootstrapping-Loader thingy where you could load stuff via RS232 into internal EEPROM/RAM for execution

[@MrBtcruiser]

I spent many years programming a 68HC05 series MCU for work back in the day, and of course in college they were teaching assembly on a 68HC12. I enjoyed the assembler mnemonics for the 6800 series MCUs as much as I enjoyed the mnemonics on the Z80 MPUs.

[@Chriva]

2010's models still have more or less the same features as this oldie - just more ram and flash. Thought they would've changed more stuff over such a long life

[@vanlife4256]

This is a very robust uC found back in the 90’s inside those ASTEX RF 13.56 MHz 500W generators for Plasma applications. It was monitoring the Reflected power from the “load” . In order to protect the MOSFET RF amp, the HC11 would drive an SCR (as part of a crowbar circuit) to short circuit the power supply! The recommendation from the OEM would be to replace the RF Generator. My solution? To replace the $10 thyristor!

[@cocusar]

we were taught 6800 in our high school back in 2010/11, I was so hyped up already because I knew how to program PICs before and the 6800 was so much flexible. never thought the 68HC11 and similar MCUs were cool, for some reason PICs were cheaper over here, and you could do the same stuff with them than the HC11s. Nowdays, I've played with 8051s, 8085, 8086, 80186, z80 and z180 sbcs but never with a 6800 or 68k. I should rectify that :)

[@chinsta00]

If ever there was such thing as retro- "microcontrolling", the 68HC11 would have to be it. In fact, I might have to dig out my 'HC11 EVBU and see if I can do something modern fancy with it, maybe a (crappy) drone flight controller?

[@henrikstenlund5385]

I have designed a lot of circuits around 68HC11 since 1989. It is really easy cpu to apply although you will need a fair amount of external chips to make it useful. Its bus is multiplexed which means the address and data bytes come out one byte at a time. I found a nasty bug in it regarding the control line timing. A certain line must be logically combined with another to really make it work. Else the data is not valid in all conditions. Another bug is in the version made by Toshiba. The PA7 line refuses to act as a full I/O as specified.

[@argoneum]

Seen it in old NMT cellphones and in SUN keyboards, among other places. Also got Ericsson 10MHz reference for NMT base station having one. Indeed, not in cheap things, but in high end stuff.

[@Pixelwaster]

I've got a Moto branded dev board for a 68HC11 somewhere. Anout the siae of a sheet of paper. Databook for the dev board too. Almost want to drag it out but not enough to dig dor it. It is probable next to the 8052-BASIC board. Used a personal word peocessor with a serial port and a daisy wheel printer to talk to them. Still have a HC11 3.25 floppy in the baxk of my 35 year old computer desk. Damn. I need a drink or three....

[@8bitwiz_]

I have over a dozen 68HC11D0 chips from a stack of junked traffic light controllers that I got cheap a few years ago. (Cheap as in under 50 bucks for the lot.) I've been playing around with one on a breadboard with the eventual plan of building a proper 6800 microcomputer, but I have yet to add the external bus chips. With its built-in serial bootloader and BUFFALO monitor, I've done a lot of things so far with little more than the chip itself and some LEDs. The disappointing side is that it only has 192 bytes of RAM (the smallest of all the '11 variants), and the DIP-40 version has two output pins un-bonded. And you read that right, it has the BUFFALO monitor in ROM; a stripped-down 4K version instead of the full 8K, on a chip that was sold as ROM-less. So I can do simple trainer stuff on it over a serial port, but there's only about 48 usable bytes of RAM because BUFFALO is a pig. I guess it was cheaper for Motorola to use the same masks for the whole series, and they had to put something in there. I would not be surprised if all the factory-custom versions were actually EPROM programmed at the factory to avoid making custom masks and bespoke fab runs.

[@henrikstenlund5385]

Two weeks ago I dumped hundreds of 68hc11E0. I thought that I would never need them but kept maybe 20 of them, just in case. They are in plcc50 or whatever

[@8bitwiz_]

Most of mine are socketed DIPs, which is what you want for breadboarding fun. Three of the boards were later revision boards with the PLCC version, and I can hot-air those off if I find a use for them.

[@colonelbarker]

Thanks for continuing this- I was worried in 8 minutes you wouldn't start to scratch setting it up- I was hoping you would breakout a breadboard and start putting together a system from scratch! :P

[@jercos]

I'm quite fond of the earlier microcontrollers, MC6801 and MC6803 (ROM and no ROM), where the ROM part can be strapped to hide the ROM. They sit between the MC6800 and 68HC11, and have excellent Hitachi clones (HD6301/HD6303) with some added instructions of their own.

[@veeaya]

Funny enough there's a whole class at my school dedicated to learning the assembly of this microcontroller and oh my god was it an absolute nightmare

[@PEGuyMadison]

I think the first development board I purchased was the 68HC16, pretty basic stuff but its the same part.

[@henrikstenlund5385]

The HC16 is much more developed. It has some really exceptional features integrated in it, like programmable chip selects for SPI and some extremely powerful signal processing commands on the ASM level. It is also much faster and has some memory and what is really good, is that its memory space is really wide allowing use of megabyte level chips for large programs

[@8bitwiz_]

Somewhere I have a 68HC16 dev board that I never got around to using, but now that I have a bit more interest, I can't find it. When I took a look at its instruction set, I was amused how they rigged it to use all 2- 4- and 6-byte instructions by clever pre-byte mapping,

[@henrikstenlund5385]

@@8bitwiz_ It does have some very useful features

[@mnoxman]

Pretty much the only place that has these left is Rochester Electronics.

[@andymouse]

Is it an IMSAI ? I still don't know what one is despite watching your channel for ages !

[@IMSAIGuy]

watch from the beginning: kzbin.info/www/bejne/en2penWHZryfo7csi=Qd4Y54TMUfZBHQpr

[@andymouse]

@@IMSAIGuy Ok now I get it, should have done this a while back ! you talk more about IMSAI Dog nowadays ! :)

[@M0UAW_IO83]

I spent quite a bit of time learning about these chips, they were used (housemarked) on Connor hard drives and they had a built in diagnostic terminal for testing the HDDs, they were also used on Andros gas analysers so I've got a *lot* of the chips in the PLCC package but also the unusual sized DIP package. Fun thing, a lot of them had the Buffalo bootloader built in so you could get one up and running real easily without needing an EPROM programmer, they're real advanced for the day and would probably still be a lot of fun to play with. .

[@8bitwiz_]

I have a few bare chips and can confirm that they are in fact a lot of fun to play with. Start by strapping MODA and MODB inputs to ground and pull-ups to a few other pins, then send an 0xFF followed by your code at 1200 baud to PD0. (org at 0000 except on 'D0 which is at 0040) Strap MODA low and MODB high, and it runs Buffalo in "single chip" mode at 9600 baud. All this using only PD0 and PD1, with all the other I/O pins free to be I/O pins. Manually set the right bit in the config register and it will go into expanded bus mode with Buffalo still running.

[@sapphiresphone7144]

I would be interested to learn more about your professional background if youd ever be up for sharing. (Or point me to that video, i couldn't find such)

[@IMSAIGuy]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/rmSsgad4r910nacsi=jBFAqo-C1D_YZuuK

[@mr1enrollment]

HeathKit Computer?

[@yuvarajcena26]

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