After receiving this Hackerbox, I was very intrigued by the idea of exploring vintage 8-bit CPUs via an Arduino Mega, and with WiFi no less. It turns out that 8bitforce has designed RetroShields for a variety of 8-bit microprocessors, including the RCA 1802 (aka COSMAC). I grabbed the Gerber files from here and submitted them to NextPCB. The PCBs took less than two weeks to arrive. Meanwhile, I ordered some 1802 chips off of EBay, which ultimately came from Hardware for Hackers. The SMD components needed to complete the assembly of the RetroShields were ordered from Amazon.
Assembly of the board required some SMD capacitors and resistors, and their values can be found on this schematic. Other than that, I added a socket for the 1802, two LEDs, and headers for the Arduino and individual 1802 pins.
The PCBs contain a warning that the software should be uploaded to the Arduino before attaching the RetroShield, so I installed this Tiny Basic sketch. After attaching the RetroShield and powering up the Arduino again, success! A menu is transmitted to the Arduino Serial Monitor, allowing a number of operations including Tiny Basic.
When I originally commented I clicked the “Notify me when new comments are added” checkbox and now each time a comment is added I get four emails with the same comment. Is there any way you can remove me from that service? Many thanks!