September 16, 2026
Hot rod the Maclab with an F411
This is just a thought exercise, but here we go.
Initially I thought of using a "black pill" board with an STM32F411 chip
on board. I have 10 or more of this in a box. They have 128K of ram and
512K of flash. They don't have as many IO pins as a person might like for
this project, so you would need to add some i2c IO expanders
like the 16 bit MCP23017.
Oddly enough, you save money buying the surface mount chip on a breakout.
F411 Nucleo board
This caught my eye when searching on the F411.
This board costs only $20 from Digikey and may have all the needed IO
already.
Here is a diagram showing the pinout:
Ignore the inner "pink" row of pins which are the Arduino compatible connector.
The outside pins are in two 38 pin connector (76 pins total), and we should be
able to find enough pins there to handle the 6502 emulation. They may be
3.3 volts, so we sill need to add level shifters. I think I like the idea
of level shifters better than the MCP23017 i2c chips.
For that matter, the MCP23017 itself would require level shifters.
Have any comments? Questions?
Drop me a line!
Tom's electronics pages / tom@mmto.org