I mostly grew up with a C64 that I learned BASIC and 6502 assembly on, but two years before our family got that machine, my father spent several evenings soldering together a MicroAce (unlicensed ZX80 clone) on our kitchen table and eventually hooked it up to a small B&W TV on UHF33 and we witnessed the wonder of 1KB of BASIC, the inverse K prompt, membrane keyboard, and fussy cassette interface. At five years old I was a little young to really appreciate the machine but it sparked an interest in computing that lead to a career in Operating System Engineering (I share some blame for later BeOS releases, Danger's HiptopOS, and Android's lower level architecture).
Some 40 years after seeing that MicroAce go from a pile of parts and a bare PCB to a Computer, I stumbled over @mahjonng's ZX81+38 project which re-imagines the ZX81 in the all-discrete 7400 series logic style of the ZX80 (and MicroAce): viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3357
It looked like a lot of fun to build and I figured it'd be fun to throw together a mechanical keyboard and custom enclosure for the new machine, which is currently looking a bit like this:
(holes in the case bottom are for faster prototype printing, will not be present in the final build)
I've got an order out to WASDkeyboards for a set of custom keycaps which should look like:
And parts and PCBs are on their way back from digikey and JLCPCB for what I'm calling "ZX PICO IO" -- a multipurpose IO peripheral based around the RP2040 MCU, some level shifters, and some address decode logic -- hoping to provide a "serial port" and "fast tape port" to get data on and off the machine via USB, and might look into implementing an alternate VGA or HDMI display peripheral (character graphics + bitmap + sprites perhaps), depending how much time I end up sinking into the project.
There are more pictures and commentary over here in this Twitter "Moment" where I've been collecting my tweets about the project:
https://twitter.com/i/events/1549999559610228736
Meanwhile I've been having a lot of fun exploring the wealth of software that's been written for the machine, marveling at WRX Hi Res mode (back in 1981 it had not yet been invented (discovered?)), and reading magazines and articles from the 80s that have been preserved in various online archives. Amazing how much has been achieved with such a limited little platform.
Standby alert 
