Nabu - Glad to be on the Bandwagon!

Recently I was happy to be among those who purchased a Nabu computer listed by the seller PellMill Inc on eBay.  I'd missed out on the first round after the video from Adrian's Digital Basement, telling myself that it would be a long time till anyone would be able to reverse engineer the product enough to load code on it.  How wrong I was!  Within a couple of weeks of the video coming out, DJ Sures and the team at The Nabu RetroNET had code up on their website that would allow a modern computer to emulate the network adapter and feed software to the Nabu PC.  Once I found out about this I regretted not purchasing a machine at first and I took the opportunity when the next batch of machines was released.

While I was waiting for my Nabu to arrive I watched videos and did some reading up on this computer.  I was able to buy the USB to RS422 adapter and solder up an adapter cable using 9 Pin D-Sub connectors I had on hand, and 5 Pin DIN connectors (DigiKey Part Number CP-1050-ND) that I'd purchased for another project.  I purchased the Dtech adapter recommended on nabu.ca, but I don't like the look of the screw terminal connector so I soldered both ends of the cable and got a nicer looking cable.

Getting the software going was a bit more of a challenge.  I used the PC based version of the application to get started.  This was actually quite simple and it worked out of the box the first time...

What I really wanted too have is a Raspberry Pi based solution so that I could permanently pair with the Nabu and have a functioning stand alone solution, just like the Nabu would have had back in the day.  Aaron at the Retro Hack Shack has a video showing how he did this which was inspiring.  It turns out that the software team has made some significant improvements in the Linux version and Mono is no longer a dependency, meaning that this can run from the "lite" version of a Raspberry Pi, and so it's easier to run this on a lower power Pi.  This is quite helpful because of how hard it has been to get Pis.  I was fortunate to find an RPi 3A+ unit from Microcenter back in December 2022.  This model doesn't have alot of RAM, so it's a good match for the lite version of Raspbian, and ends up being a good match for the proeject with a the compact size but also a full sized usb port for the Serial Dongle to plug into...

This solution create a nice clean solution which can easily be mounted behind the Nabu, and I can remote in to the Pi (via ssh) from any modern computer to run the text based console app that is handy in order to change to a different software cycle.

I'm excited about learning more from my hands on experiences with the Nabu.  I've already moved it out to the main entertainment center...

It's great been alot of fun playing DigDug and other 8-bit classics on the flat panel TV.  The Nabu fits in quite well with the "mostly" black look of my entertainment center, it truly was a product ahead of its time both in both form and function.