Acorn Electron Portable
The Acorn Electron Portable was born from three main things, getting a little green screen modual, a fixed Acorn Electron motherboard & a desire to the the Acorn Electron Laptop correct instead of the bodge I did on the original. Anyway it started by hacking the keyboard together from an old ZX81 I got because of the custom keyboard. I restored the ZX81 later on anyway.
Acorn Electron Portable in an early state. I build the keyboard first.
The CRT modual before modification.
The keyboard was not that hard to put together. I used my drill & a file to create new holes for the keys, most holes were just reused. Still need a proper space key though. I did need a few diodes & resistos for the computer to boot & keyboard to work. I made a test modual I could plug into the motherboard that would allow the computer to boot with out a keyboard. Esentialy a dummy keyboard.
The keyboard was more just time consuming to wire, took about two full evenings after work to put together or one full day. Maybe two as I did stay up late working on it. Was cool when I had it up & running. I also ordered a ton of ribbon cables to connect the keyboard to the machine with enougth slack as there was not much slack with one lot of ribbon cable.
The underside of the keyboard is a rats nest of wireing. The matrix is now completly diffrent from the ZX81 it was used on. Still bares some of the scars from that initial layout.
The dummy keyboard to the left was built before I had made the main keyboard as the Electron will not boot without a keyboard. So they dummy unit allows it to boot & also the buttons allow basic functionality. It cosists of five resistors, two LEDs, two switches, two diodes, one bit of pref board & female pin header.
Some testing of the keyboard after building it. It worked a treat. I even fixed some of the dead keys that got damaged in storage & potenataly use over the years.
All testing went well, but the Acorn Electron manual has the keyboard schmatic in it.
The CRT modual I did get though had a probem, it did not have any internal drivers, so it needed external H synk & V synk so I obtianed a few mini B/W TVs from back in the mid 2000s. I composite modded one of them that was RF only. In the end I did not use the TVs but used a 5 inch CCTV monitor. I took the board out of that & mounted it in the CRT modual frame. It had good mounts to bolt it to an internal chassis. The little TVs will find them selves in another project at some point. Plus mini CRTs are kind of cool.
Keyboard chassis. The only place I have used rivits so far.
The case with the moitor in an early state of contruction.
CRT modual mounted in the chassis & the rest being built around the display. This is a pretty early stage of the case build when I was still mesureing up & using the CRT modual as a size refrence.
The main case fully asembled around the CRT modual. Built with alumimium right angle material & bolted together. Part of the keyboard case is hald together with rivits, but that is not an area that would impeed mainternace of the machine.
The Acorn Electron Portabable in its current state running. Using the dummy keybaord as I could not be assed to hook up the main one I made. The next part to do is design & build the power supply.
The motherboard mounted in the case with the SD card adapter in place as well as the Electron speaker mounted to the grill so yiou can get those lovely bleeps & bloops.