Arduino from USSR times
Sooner or later, working with electronics, when you move from the level of simple flashers and programmers for radio stations, first on Arduino, then drop lower to the level of pure stone, you begin to be interested in a related topic – microprocessors. I think that many homemade electronics engineers are familiar with this topic, when you absorb a bunch of educational material in books, on SO, on YouTube, on forums, and then suddenly you find yourself watching a great series of videos from Ben Eater about building 6502 computers. A real computer. And now you are already looking towards programming for dandy/nes, or, in the 21st century, you want to buy yourself a Spectrum, something for 6502 or even a pure 8086, in order to find yourself in an even stronger framework, to feel like that programmer who will squeeze everything out juices, count every processor cycle…
Personally, this happened to me. Deepening my knowledge in atmega328pb, I went a little lower and climbed into the territory of creating games like a dandy (via 6502), the territory of low-level programming and all the difficulties associated with this matter. And so I realized that I wanted to buy myself a NES hardware, I climbed onto Avito… then there was a darkening in my eyes and I came to my senses already on the search page for microcontrollers from the times of the USSR. Just idle interest, nothing more, because I was never a spektrumist, and I found the USSR in a stroller. And here in front of me is an advertisement with the text: KPI8I6BE51 KULIK, computer, USSR. With a price of 550 rub. I didn’t think for long.
Having pressed the button and paid for the order, I began to Google, Yandex, and simply ask everyone about this miracle. It didn't look much like the computer in the picture, because… The computer should have a little more chips IMHO. The search engines did not produce anything intelligible, neither by the long name, nor even more so by the queries “computer sandpiper.” All I could do was wait, which is what I did, looking at this jeep for three days. And here is the treasured SMS from Boxberry, I went to the neighboring house and picked up the parcel, bringing it to work, removed the top box, half a kilo of baby bump and here it is – a miracle of Soviet thought: TRAINING SET – KR1816VE51 “KULIK”. Only when I held it in my hands did I realize that the name was entirely in Cyrillic, and those letters that were written with an i were actually the number 1.
A little more box
Having shaken off a layer of dust and sand, and there was really a lot of it, I started unpacking. It's not every day you hold something like this in your hands. Inside, everything turned out to be not as bad as I thought – not just a bag, but also foam packaging, which looked very strong. It came out with difficulty, clinging to the staples and like glue. We open the “shell” and… we see Soviet plastic bags. It feels like .25 mm, the edges are all crooked, and the bags themselves are not even closed – just wrapped.
Inside the box
Let's look at the composition of the kit:
Severe Soviet cardboard box
Harsh Soviet foam box
Typewritten instructions on 34 sheets (two double-page diagrams)
Connection cable 5DIN – RSh2N-1-23
Single-chip microcomputer “Kulik”.
I think that the first thing everyone, like me, will of course be interested in is the chip itself, but as it turns out, there’s nothing particularly interesting here. The board contains a microcontroller, clone 8051 from the Voronezh plant, marked 1991. Although this question is still open to me – the MK itself seems to have other markings erased and reapplied. The surface of the chip seems to be rough… Unfortunately, I don’t know how to program for the 8051, but when I started Googling this topic, I realized that I couldn’t do it, because… The MK is one-time programmable. It won’t work to upload the program like a regular duina.
The characteristics of the MK are quite good even by modern standards – 12 megahertz (there is such a resonator on the board), memory 4 kilobytes, RAM 128 bytes, two counters of 16 bits, UART… in general, typical architecture 8051current consumption – up to 1 W with power supply from a single voltage of 5V.
On the board itself, only the 5DIN connector stands out. I have already forgotten what they looked like, although I saw them in various tape recorders of my parents. But here… on the board… It’s extremely strange. The second thing that surprised me was a 16-volt capacitor at the output, cranks. I've never seen anything like this before. The board's power supply is simple – we get from 8 to 12 per input, then comes the stabilizing electrolyte, then KREN5A, followed by a 6V stabilizing capacitor, and then the wiring – one track goes to the left header, the second to the right, along the way touching the Soviet LED, which It only looks like this in the flash photo, but in reality it is very dark and almost opaque.
Board on the back and top
In terms of circuit design, everything is extremely simple – power is supplied either from the DIN5 connector via KREN5A, or directly from the headers. The DIN5 connector itself contains pins 9 (SBR/AP), 29 (RVPP), 30 (SAVP/PROG) and 31 (ORPP/DP). On the 2×10 block to the left of the MK there are pins of port 1 and port 3, on the blocks to the right (2×5) there are ports 2 and 0, respectively. At the bottom left we see a quartz resonator at 12000 kHz and its harness in the form of two conductors. In principle, that's all. We don't see anything else on the board.
The next package in the box is a cable, kindly tied with a black thread, which immediately reminded me of my father’s MGTF coil, which was also tied. The cable is thick but flexible. Like all Soviet cables from the package, it smells of some kind of grease. The pinout is very interesting – the cable is soldered in a mirror way. Those. at the end of RSh2N-1-23 – the pins on both sides are the same, but mirrored and this eliminates incorrect connection! Type-c from the late 80s!
Connection
Well, the manual… The manual is actually quite thick, 34 turns, including 2 double-page spreads with diagrams and even a printed circuit board! On the first page there is even a thoughtful reminder that the set is constantly being improved, so errors may occur. By the way, they exist. The box shows a slightly different board, without jumpers and with a screw screwed into the handle, whereas this is not on the board. Unfortunately the manual has been destroyed. Already the third page was tightly stuck to the fourth and beyond. Some form of epoxy I think. I tried to pick out the diagram on the last page, but unfortunately this only led to damage to the page.
More instructions
Conclusion
It is difficult to draw an unambiguous conclusion. On the one hand, this is an MK with wiring on a board, with large instructions that covered the needs of programmers in the pre-Internet era. The delivery package… does not inspire much joy; it would be much more interesting to see a couple of modules for this case, so that you can turn it into something useful. Although the raspberry is greatly spoiled by the one-time programmable ROM. And from this side, the KR1816BE31, with its external ROM erasable by ultraviolet light, sounds more interesting. On the other hand, if these controllers weren’t my April Fool’s invention, but actually existed, I think it would be a good toy for those young guys who have already soldered their Spectrum and want something more, for example collect yours Laura or automate your dacha or home.
