ORCID ID:Origins of my Home Laboratory
My fascination with both hardware and formal logic began on a bicycle ride in 1975. I was six years old, and my father (then a captain or commandant in the Belgian Transmissietroepen (Signal Corps) and chair of the garrison's swimming club) took me to see the new pool being excavated at the military barracks in Peutie. Afterward, he brought me into the computer building and showed me the CII Mitra computer managing RITA (Réseau Intégré des Transmissions Automatiques), the joint Franco-Belgian tactical wireless telephone network (a system later adopted by NATO). Decades before civilian 2G GSM networks existed, RITA already offered automated mobile cellular routing — the main difference being the batteries, which required either a heavy backpack or a jeep mount, while the relay "towers" were mounted on trucks designed to roll out across a theatre of war.Standing in front of that machine in the middle of the first AI Winter, it was explained to me that the computer could not think, but it could reason and infer using something called logic. That afternoon, I began studying logic gates — starting with physical switches wired in series and parallel, and soon moving on to transistors and integrated circuits. My father gave me his Boolean Algebra textbook from the Royal Military Academy, which I had read cover-to-cover by the age of eleven.
Around the same time, I wrote my first programs on a Texas Instruments TI-59 programmable calculator. One of the earliest tasks my father gave me was to write a program to sum the track durations of his vinyl records to calculate the total playing time per side, which required converting back and forth between decimal values and base-60 minutes and seconds. Only after I had written and debugged the routine did he point out the built-in DMS (Degrees/Minutes/Seconds) key on the keypad. Discovering that I had just re-implemented a hardware function from scratch was a defining, demystifying moment: it taught me that those buttons are not magic black boxes, but transparent systems that can be understood completely from first principles.
Meanwhile, I had been saving every franc since the age of six toward a machine of my own. Many people around me thought I was crazy — in the late 1970s, owning a computer was considered completely out of reach for a child. In 1980, I finally got my first personal computer: a Sharp MZ-80K. People at the time asked me what I could possibly want to do with a computer. Four years later, I was teaching Boolean algebra at the Youth Computer Club; nearly half a century later, that path culminated in my 2017 PhD in symbolic logic.
Retrocomputing as an Epistemic Stance
In the contemporary digital landscape, computing is largely experienced through high-level abstractions that decouple the user from the machine. This trend has fostered an epistemic crisis where the processes of information generation and execution are no longer verifiable by the individual.This home laboratory and the projects housed within it, from restoring vintage 8-bit systems to designing the ZPLANAC 8000, are an intentional departure from this state of affairs. They are rooted in an Epistemic Stance that views computing not as a black-boxed service to be passively consumed, but as a formal system to be utterly mastered.
Core Principles of the Lab
- The Materiality of Logic: In this space, logic is not an abstract cloud service or an opaque statistical model; it is a physical arrangement of voltages, timing diagrams, and gate transitions. Every state transition is deterministic and traceable.
- Vintage Equipment as a Human-Scale Foundation: The choice to build around processors like the Zilog Z8001 reflects a commitment to working within a "human-scale" axiomatic system. Designed at the logic gate level by a single human mind, the Z8000 lacks the "dark matter" of modern multi-billion transistor CPUs, offering an unbroken chain of comprehension from the silicon up.
- Reclaiming Intellectual Autonomy: This laboratory serves as a protest against the "de-skilling" of the modern era. It is designed as a "gymnasium for the mind" — a space where the truth of a system is not inferred through statistics, but witnessed through the direct observation of physical, formal logic.
Laboratory Equipment
Vintage & Retrocomputing Systems
- Sharp MZ-80K (twice): Classic late-1970s Z80-based "clean computer" architecture.
- Hewlett-Packard HP-85A: Vintage laboratory computer equipped with an EBTKS (Electronic Tape & Disk/ROM/RAM emulator) card and an HP-IB (IEEE-488 / GPIB) instrumentation interface.
- Commodore 64 Ultimate & THEVIC20: Modern FPGA/emulation-enhanced implementations of classic Commodore 8-bit architectures.
- Sinclair ZX Spectrum Next (KS3): Advanced FPGA-based evolution of the ZX Spectrum.
- MiSTer FPGA: Cycle-accurate hardware recreation platform for classic microcomputers, consoles, and arcade systems.
- Wyse WY-60 Terminal: Vintage serial ASCII terminal, actively connected to the Udoo Bolt V8 Linux host.
Modern Compute, Clusters & Embedded Systems
- Udoo Bolt V8: Custom/compact desktop running Debian Linux (serving as host for the Wyse WY-60 terminal), featuring an onboard Arduino Leonardo microcontroller for interfacing with other parts of the lab.
- Sharp Zaurus SL-C3000: Classic Linux-powered clamshell PDA featuring a 640×480 VGA display and built-in microdrive.
- Raspberry Pi 400: Dedicated ARM setup running native RISC OS.
- 8086.net Cluster: Compact cluster comprising a Raspberry Pi 3 host and four Raspberry Pi Zeros.
- M5Stamp S3 Card Computer: Ultra-compact ESP32-S3 microcontroller module.
- QNAP TS-431P NAS: Centralized local network storage, archival repository, and lab infrastructure.
Test, Measurement & Instrumentation
- HP 1660C Logic Analyzer: Vintage 102-channel logic analyzer with HP-IB (IEEE-488) interface for multi-bus digital debugging.
- Tektronix 2430A Digital Oscilloscope: Vintage dual-channel 150 MHz digital storage oscilloscope with IEEE-488 interface (allowing automated data capture and IEEE-488 integration with the HP-85A and HP 1660C).
- König OS 60 R: Classic dual-trace analogue oscilloscope for real-time waveform inspection.
- LabNation SmartScope: USB-based mixed-signal oscilloscope, logic analyzer, and arbitrary waveform generator.
- TinySA Spectrum Analyzer: Compact, portable RF spectrum analyzer for signal and frequency domain analysis.
- Feeltech DDS Function Generator / Counter: Dual-channel signal generation and frequency measurement.
- ExTech EX330: Autoranging digital multimeter with non-contact voltage detection and temperature probe.
- EISTAR LP-1: Handheld digital logic probe for quick TTL/CMOS state tracing.
- HYELEC HY3003: Regulated benchtop DC power supply.
Workstation, Rework & Component Inventory
- XGecu T48 (TL866 3G) Programmer: Universal hardware programmer used for flashing EEPROMs, microcontrollers, and CPLDs
- Aoyue INT 937: Temperature-controlled soldering station.
- Optics: Optical stereo microscope (for fine-pitch inspection) and digital USB microscope (for documentation).
- Silicon & Discrete Components: Assortment of vintage and modern CPUs/MCUs (Zilog Z80 & Z8000, RCA COSMAC 1802, ARM, RISC-V, ESP32), peripheral interface chips, 74-series digital logic, programmable logic (FPGAs, CPLDs, GALs), OpAmps, and passive components.
Active Projects & Development
- ZPLANAC 8000 (Z8000 Pluggable Logic Array Network Adaptable Computer): A custom-designed, modular 16-bit retrocomputer built around the Zilog Z8001 CPU. Featuring a 17-slot backplane, dual-master architecture with an Arduino Mega 2560 supervisor, CPLD-managed dynamic memory mapping, and a dedicated front-panel hexadecimal keypad with 16-segment LED displays, the project is designed as an exercise in total system transparency and formal logical mastery.
- MZ-80K Software Revival: Re-authoring and re-implementing lost games I originally wrote in the 1980s for the Sharp MZ-80K.
- HP-IB/IEEE-488 Instrument Automation: Establishing a hardware bus bridge between the HP-85A computer, HP 1660C logic analyzer, and Tektronix 2430A oscilloscope for automated waveform and logic state capture.
