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Last year I developed an ASCII Keyboard Tester (see https://www.applefritter.com/content/ascii-keyboard-tester and https://www.applefritter.com/content/ascii-keyboard-tester-pcb-and-kits) to please my curiosity in the electronic workings of the Apple-1. Great to see this scene of enthusiasts is so alive.

I came across an article by Don Lancaster in the Popular Electronics April 1974 issue about the ASCII Keyboard and Encoder. They use a Monsanto MAN-2 display, a 5x7 dot matrix. Using a 2513 character generator, it displays a single character that is typed in on the ASCII Keyboard. It is on page 29/30, some PDFs around there are missing these specific pages, so I attached the article here for reference.

Anyway long story short, I designed a Character Generator Tester, which shows the characters that are generated by the 2513. I use a KingBright TA-07-11EWA as a display. It also supports 2316B, 2716 EPROM and 2816 EEPROMs. So it enables you to test Character Generator’s for the Apple-1 and Apple ][, and you can test self made EEPROMS (or 2513 drop-in’s) that should replace the originals.

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Hello!

I've got what I believe to be a 100% accurate KiCad Schematic of the Apple II Revision 0 system board.  To do so, I did the following:

1.  Downloaded the KiCad schematic for the Apple II+ from https://github.com/baldengineer/bit-preserve/tree/main/Apple

2.  Reverted the schematic back to the R0 schematic as per "The Apple II Circuit Description" by W. Gayler.

3.  Imported the Gerber files for the system board as created by Mike Willegal.

4.  Added footprints for the components.

5.  Added the footprints to the imported gerber files to ensure accuracy.

6.  Fixed various schematic issues.

I didn't upload the board file as the gerber import messed up the thickness of the traces, so it needs extensive re-work to set the proper thicknesses.

Link: https://github.com/baldengineer/bit-preserve/tree/main/Apple  (Local Archive, 2024-01-20)