Konilo Hardware Project

The current hardware is a Teensy 4.1, 480x320 SPI display, and a
keyboard. USB based power supply. Using the SD card from the
Teensy for block and ROM storage. The ilo system can use either
a built-in copy of the ROM or load one from the SD card.

We are working on the display. I've done work with a simple
character display, but due to not finding any models really
suited for displaying at least one full line of text, have begun
moving to an SPI display, with a 1bpp framebuffer. This will
support the basic graphica display extension for simple graphics
and the set of DEC escape sequences needed for terminal programs

For keyboard, we are experimenting with both a small I2C board
from m5stack and PS/2 interfaces. The Teensy can handle acting
as a USB host, but I've not looked into this yet.

Power is run over a USB port on the Teensy. I'm planning to
change this, bypassing the port & having a separate power
control module which will allow charging & use of a battery for
portability. Design work on this has nit started yet.

Physical design: currently all separate components, loosely
interconnected with a lot of wires. I've started experimenting
with PCB layout tools. We're considering designing a simple PCB
with solder points for the Teensy, power input, and display.
Everything will be thru hole; no surface mount components. If we
stick with the currently planned Z88 style slab form factor, I
could include the keyboard solder points on the PCB.

Other directions: we are going to work on a port for the RP2350.
It's intended that this will be used for embedded designs where
less computing power is needed, and maybe for a less expensive
overall system. Doing an RP2350 version is very appealing due to
the ClockworkPi PicoCalc (https://www.clockworkpi.com/picocalc),
which was recently launched.

I have an ESP32 board with a VGA and PS/2 mouse & keyboard ports
but getting documentation and setting up a build environment for
it has proven unfruitful so far.