Aiie Is a Portable Apple //e Emulated on a Teensy 4.1
Advanced portable Apple //e project gets some upgrades.
Emulating the venerable Apple ][ on modern hardware is pretty standard. Doing it with microcontrollers takes the concept to a different level. Photographer and a tech geek, Jorj Bauer, created Aiie — an embedded portable Apple II that emulates a full-speed //e with a Teensy 4.1!
Aiie has an SPI-driven TFT display, a push-button keyboard, and a joystick all driven from a Teensy. Initially, the design featured the Teensy 3.x version of the microcontroller board. After being on the back burner, Bauer introduced Aiie Mk2, which upgrades his project to use the faster Teensy 4.1.
"Teensy 4.1 (600 MHz arm Cortex M7) running a full-speed Apple //e emulator. Because everyone needs one of these, right?"
The extra clock speed and RAM of the Teensy 4.1 offer Aiie some new capabilities. While the 4.1 supports an extra RAM on-board, the chip uses some of the IO pins. The result is the upgrade meant a reduction of 17 available pins from the previous Teensy 3.6-based design and some redesign work for Bauer.
The video above shows the Mk2 assembly with the latest revision of the PCBs. You can order a set of boards from this OSH Park project sharing link.
Not related to the processor, another significant change from earlier designs is using a boost circuit for the primary power supply. The previous generation of Aiie powered directly from the battery, which produced some undesirable behaviors.
Aiie is not complete. There is some additional hardware, like an ESP-01, which Bauer has plans to add functionality in the future. And if you are good at enclosure design, Aiie is in need of one!
Check out Bauer's Hackaday.io page for extensive project build logs. There is no kit available for sale (yet?). But you can build one using the EAGLE design files and code available on Aiie's GitHub repository.