News
ELF 2000 and an ELF from 1977
The ELF 2000 by Spare Time Gizmos is a wonderful kit that can expand to support compact flash cards and run Mike Riley’s ELF OS.
A new gallery page has been added for a 1977 ELF build submitted (long ago) by Marc Venis. Marc’s approach was to use discrete LEDs for the display and mount the controls above the CPU board, giving it a very distinct look.
Lastly, the History page has been spiffed up a bit with a few photos. It needed a little something.
IEEE Spectrum: Return of the ELF
On the forum Andrew Wasson pointed out that Stephen Cass has his second ELF-related article online. The first article introduced IEEE Spectrum readers to the Membership Card kit created by Lee Hart (“Move Over, Arduino: Here Comes the Cosmac Elf”). The second article, titled “Return of the Elf: Making a 1976 microcomputer more user friendly” builds on that introduction by describing the addition of a hex keypad, display, and program loader.
Also, as you may have noticed, the oversized banner graphics on the site have been halved, thanks to the rapid support of Blueball Design. I appreciate everyone’s feedback on the updated site.
Car Computer
I don’t even want to tell you how long ago Christian Godzinsky sent in his gallery submission, but I found it and added it to the backlog, and a page describing his car computer is now up. Thanks, Christian!
Banner Improvement
The banner graphic is a little too big for my taste, and it certainly gets in the way on the individual photo pages (like this one). The banner is now suppressed on those pages, which makes navigating between photos in a collection much easier.
Across the rest of the site, I’ll try to find a way to reduce the banner height somewhat, hopefully something that won’t require special tweaking to each individual page. No time for that tonight, however.
Wet Paint
After 14 years online, cosmacelf.com finally received some long-overdue remodeling. The little website I set up to support the TinyELF emulator for the Palm OS grew bit-by-bit until it became tedious to make even simple changes to the hand-coded HTML. Adding a gallery page was time consuming after all the related navigation on other pages was updated, and that took the fun out of the process and resulted in a lot of procrastination. Then the iPhone and iPad paved the way for a host of small screen browsers, and there is nothing kind that could be said for how cosmacelf.com looked on those devices.
The revamped site is built using a Mac program called Sandvox that should take much of the tedium out of managing it. I’m using a design called Flexor Responsive from Blueball Design, which is supposed to be mobile-friendly (as Google is becoming rather insistent on — rightly, I think).
The bad news is that any deep links to pages in the site almost are certainly broken; folders and even file names have changed. If you linked to something at cosmacelf.com, please check and see if your link can be updated to a current page.
Most of the content should be migrated by now, but please let me know if you notice something important missing or if the site behaves strangely.