I've been playing around with ESP32 MCUs and displays for a while and finally got around to getting a ZX Spectrum emulator working. I then saw that you can now do full color silk screen printing on PCBs and got the thinking - the ESP32 has capacitive touch capabilities - I could make a full ZX Spectrum keyboard on a PCB along with all the electronics for running the emulator. And it actually works!<p>There's a full video here: <a href="https://youtu.be/foP81O48WAI" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/foP81O48WAI</a><p>And you can sign up here for updates as I move towards getting it ready for a production run: <a href="https://esp32zx.substack.com/p/announcing-the-esp32-zx-spectrum" rel="nofollow">https://esp32zx.substack.com/p/announcing-the-esp32-zx-spect...</a><p>It's looks amazing, takes me back to my childhood.
It will also be completely open source. The Z80 emulator I'm using is GPL, so all the firmware I write will be GPL.<p>And the Schematics, PCB and Gerbers will all be available as a KiCad project for people to play with and even get assembled themselves.
If you want to do a 128 model version and have it interface to a real AY sound chip, I've written ESP32 code for that: <a href="https://bitbucket.org/doughammond/fourays/src/master/" rel="nofollow">https://bitbucket.org/doughammond/fourays/src/master/</a>
I created a ZX Spectrum BASIC compiler (compiles from BASIC to ZX Spectrum machine code).<p>You might want to give it a try and run the programs in your device: <a href="https://github.com/boriel-basic/zxbasic">https://github.com/boriel-basic/zxbasic</a>
Oh lord, you just <i>had</i> to use a screenshot of Elite :)<p>It looks utterly wonderful, I wish you every success in your production run!<p>Makes me want to play Manic Miner.
You might be interested in knowing that LCSC (same company as JLCPCB) are about to offer proper panel / membrane keypad prototyping: <a href="https://www.lcsc.com/panel-printing" rel="nofollow">https://www.lcsc.com/panel-printing</a>
Looks good. One note about the video: you mention you recently watched a good video on 1-bit sound, and suggest it's worth a watch, but it doesn't appear to be linked-to in the description.
Fantastic project and that colour silk-screen seems to work perfectly for this.<p>It's not clear what size screen would be ideal though, as a 3-4" one will seema bit 'stuck on'. Maybe an option for a larger screen to make a 'spectrum clamshell laptop', and/or a video out to have no screen at all.