TI 99/4A weather condition station

If you still have a drawer full of slap bracelets from the 1990s because, you know, they may come back, then you’ll appreciate [Vorticon’s] most current project. Sure, we see great deals of weather condition stations, however this is managed by a TI 99/4A computer. This house computer from the 1980s was really ahead of its time with a 16-bit processor.

The sensors utilize Xbee modules as well as an Arduino Uno. Of course, the Uno has a lot more power than the TI computer, however that’s not truly the point, right? He’s made a series of videos outlining the building (you can see the very first one below, however there are five, so far).

Normally, speaking serial to the Arduino would need assembly language on the TI computer. However, TI hacker [Rich Gilbertson] already fixed that. He produced rich prolonged fundamental (RxB), which has a phone call IO statement that was best for [Vorticon’s] needs.

The TMS9900 CPU had a book function where subroutine phone calls triggered the registers to shift to ensure that each subroutine had some registers in typical with their caller as well as some that were private. This seems great on paper, however the registers residing in primary memory was a death sentence as processor speeds boosted (the 9900 in this computer only ran at 3 MHz). It likewise had a sprite-based graphics processor that was utilized to great impact in games.

No matter exactly how impractical, we like these old vintage projects. even though a new owner of a TI 99/4A back in the 1980s would have been shocked at exactly how much computing power you can get for the expense of a great meal now, the TI was still capable of some impressive output for its day. While it may not be able to play Doom or phone call of Duty, it can manage Flappy Bird.