Aaron Eiche Celebrates the Apple Macintosh's 40th Anniversary in Miniature Style — with a Badge SAO

Robotics software engineer Aaron Eiche is celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Apple Macintosh in style — by recreating it in badge add-on form, complete with monochrome display and powered by the ultra-low-cost WCH Electronics CH32V0003 RISC-V microcontroller.

"To celebrate the the 40th anniversary of the introduction of the original [Apple] Macintosh, this SAO [Simple Add-On] will… look like a Mac," Eiche writes of his creation, which is designed to mimic a Macintosh in miniature. "And maybe act a little bit like one too. This idea has been bolstered by two hardware finds: a 0.66" OLED 64×48px display [and] the unfathomably cheap WCH CH32V003 microcontroller."

The Apple Macintosh, later known as the Macintosh 128K to differentiate it from later models, launched in 1984 to critical acclaim. Generally recognized as the first mass-market all-in-one personal computer to come with a graphical user interface as standard, the machine was built around a 9" monochrome cathode-ray tube (CRT) display that displayed a 512×342-pixel bitmapped desktop controlled via a bundled mouse.

That resolution is, coincidentally, the same aspect ratio as Eiche's 0.66" OLED — albeit eight times the resolution and displayed on a monitor nearly fourteen times the size. The display, under the control of the WCH CH32V0003 RISC-V microcontroller, runs a firmware designed to mimic the desktop environment of the original Macintosh at a considerably reduced resolution — and allows the device to operate standalone with only power, or as a badge add-on using the Simple (or Sh*tty) Add-On pinout.

The hardware is installed on a compact PCB, which mimics the look of the Apple Macintosh, albeit only from the front; a cut-out in the board allows the display to shine through. "I was feeling a bit concerned about the detail of the Apple logo," Eiche admits, "and and the outline around the shape that was provided by masking, but I don't think I could be happier with how it looks. It's really great."

The project, which is now in the final stages of firmware development and awaiting PCBs which address a minor mistake in the header pinout, is detailed in full on Hackaday.io.