Derek Woodroffe Shrinks the Lynx with a 1:3-Scale Working Replica of Camputers' Classic 8-Bit Micro
With a fully-functional keyboard and a scale-matched full-color monitor, this tiny eight-bit puts the "micro" in "microcomputer."
Maker Derek Woodroffe has built a teeny-tiny functional replica of a Camputers Lynx, an eight-bit microcomputer from the 1980s — 3D-printed in miniature and complete with a working color monitor as a display, all driven from a Raspberry Pi Pico.
"[The Camputers Lynx] lost out due to the lack of game titles compared to the [Sinclair/Timex] Spectrum and [Acorn] BBC Micro/Electron. But I had one and I loved it," Woodroffe explains. "I took the measurements from a real Lynx and scaled it to roughly fit the keyboard I had with the PicoPuter. It came out as roughly 1:3."
Released in 1983 and discontinued a year later, the Camputers Lynx was not a commercial success. Based on the Zilog Z80 processor and offering from 48kB to 128kB of RAM depending on model, the machines used a Motorola 6845 chip to drive a 256×252 resolution display with eight colors — a feature which stood head and shoulders above competitors like the Commodore 64 but which proved difficult for developers to harness. Coupled with a high retail price and a poor software library, the Lynx failed to capture any significant share of the 80s microcomputer market.
That doesn't mean it was without its fans, though, and Woodroffe — who has owned three of the estimated 30,000 manufactured and sold — is among them. Rather than take up desk space with an original Lynx, though, he set about building a 1:3-scale replica — using a Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller board as the driving force and an emulator written by Charles Peter Debenham Todd for the Espressif ESP32.
"Swapping over the emulator and porting the ESP32 code to the Pico was amazingly straight forward," Woodroffe recalls. "I needed to write some code to DMA [Direct Memory Access] out the RGB [Red Green Blue] banks to a display (240×320 OLED) and I quickly got a Lynx prompt."
With the emulator ported, Woodroffe turned his attention to the housing — designing a scale replica of the original Lynx casing, tailored for an existing compact keyboard designed for Woodroffe's earlier PicoPuter project and using laser-cut acrylic keys. This was joined by a 3D-printed display, designed to mimic the rough design of an IBM 5151 but with space for the OLED display panel.
Full build details are available on Woodroffe's website, Extreme Electronics.