Tag Archives: Leonardo

The Sinclair ZX81: a Raspberry Pi retro restyle – Part 1

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I love the design of the Sinclair ZX81. It was never a great computer, even in 1981. It only had 1KB of on-board RAM, it was slow, it was small, it could only do black and white graphics, and it’s membrane keyboard was useless for fast typing. But it looked fantastic: black, sleek and totally futuristic. Almost all other 1980s microcomputers now look very dated. No surprise there, of course, but the ZX81 still looks amazing.

The ZX81 membrane keyboard
The ZX81 keyboard hooked up to the Pi via USB and Arduino
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