Making a CRT Terminal with Pi Pico and Tek 3001 LA

WORK IN PROGRESS JUST NOTES NOW

What a terrible title but it does capture the essence. I came into this Tektronix 3001 Logic Analyzer. I wasn’t sure what to do with it. Way too old to be useful but old enough to have a bit of a retro vibe. I already have plans to update the keyboard. But oh that luscious verdant P-31 phosphor. I can’t toss that in the bin.

So what can we do? It looks like the video is TTL Let’s make a terminal! My first job after college was doing serial terminal firmware for Data General so this will a good look back. I have seen some projects using a RP2040 to generate VGA or HDMI video. I should be able to do similar for a monochrome display.

The RP2040 has 2 CPU cores and fits well where one core can be the CRTC and the other can process the serial data and ANSI text commands.

After playing with some of the video options of the Pico like the DVI board I think this python solution is the way to go at least to start. https://github.com/HughMaingauche/PICO-VGA-Micropython/blob/main/VGA-with%20fonts/VGA.py

Standard PC timings using the VGA project (above) are:

Using a pi Pico (or trying to use a Pico 2)