Almost exactly four years ago I whiled away a few hours building a thermometer for the Vectrex – this is probably the weirdest thing I’ve build for the Vectrex so far and the utter nonsensical nature of it still occasionally just makes me smile. The first one was literally a thermometer for the Vectrex itself – using an internal 1-wire chip, the DS18S20 – applied, umm, orally to test its temperature. A very short time later I’ve added support for the DS18B20 chip – a 1-wire variant which usually sits inside a stainless steel sensor at the end of a cable for external temperature measurements. Now you could measure all kinds of things: tea, coffee, ice-cream, yourself.. endless fun !
Quite a while later when I was playing with a real time clock I thought I should also add support for this rtc chip to the thermometer code so that I can actually run the ‘testing the Vectrex itself’ incarnation on this setup, too (the RTC has a temp. sensor for on-going calibration purposes). Which is where it so far ended and the project fell asleep again.
Until today when out of the blue Tony Lindberg sent me a ridiculously nice custom shell so I immediately rummaged around and found all the parts to build one again:
Which also made me realize that I forgot to publish the data of how to build one via this site so here it is: