crsjones/tec-1

Talking Electronics Computer TEC-1

TEC-1

The TEC-1 is a single board Z80 computer that was originally presented in Talking Electronics Magazine Issue 10, published in 1983.

In June 2021 I obtained permission from Colin Mitchell, the publisher of the now defunct Talking Electronics Magazine, to make the PCB available again. The TEC-1F is the result, keeping to it's simple design principles I have added a few features to make it a little easier to use in a more modern context.

It's still very much a retro design, but the two main changes, adding a bit banged serial port and changing the memory footprint from 24 to 28 pin devices give the ability to communicate with the board via a USB to serial converter and allow an increase in ROM and RAM capacity while still being capable of running all of the legacy software from the magazine unchanged.

Colin Mitchell provided the Protel PCB design file for the TEC-1D, since there had not been a Protel schematic my first task was to reverse engineer the PCB file to create a TEC-1D schematic, this can also be found here.

NOTE: Colin Mitchell has not open sourced the TEC design so the Gerber files for the TEC-1D, and by extension, the TEC-1F, are not available.