Digital Tape Recorder for the KIM-1 and Micro-KIM

This project is all about vintage computers but mainly about the KIM-1 and the micro-KIM 6502 Single Board Computers (SBC).

The KIM-1 has a cassette recorder interface which is used to store and retrieve programs from the KIM-1. This interface is slow (to todays standards) and unreliable. It takes minutes to store or retrieve a larger program. So for all intents and purposes I designed a digital Tape Recorder that bypasses the analogue KIM-1 cassette interface and connects direct to the digital pins of the KIM-1 (or micro-KIM). Writing a program to the digital Tape Recorder is as slow as it always has been but reading is about ten times faster. So you can load BASIC in the blink of an eye!

You can read all about it on my website.

From the stencil and some spare PCB's I made a "Stencil Table".

I used an old creditcard to put the solder paste on the PCB.

Then place all SMD components on the PCB..

In the Reflow Oven the solderpaste aligns the small components

The THT parts are then hand soldered

Last step is soldering the OLED display. Be aware of the polarity of the header pins. There are, as far as I know, two variants of these display's. The connections are:

1. GND - Vcc - SCK - SDA
2. Vcc - GND - SCK - SDA

The board is standard wired as the first one but on the back there are two bridges with which you can also select the second one (by cutting two traces and soldering-bridge the opposite ones).