Led on Jamie Montgomerie’s World Wide Web Log

Rescuing vintage microcontrollers part 3: Life at long last

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In this series of posts, I’m rescuing vintage microcontrollers from their decades-long purgatory in a drawer in my local makerspace. To this end, I’m attempting to use them to drive a LED sign made of WS2812 strips

So far in this series, I found some decades-old Signetics SCN8031AH and OKI MSM83C154 microcontrollers in a drawer, and worked out that they’re 8051 and 8052 derivatives (members of the MCS-51 family) from the 1980s, and calculated that it should be possible to make them control modern WS2812 LED strips.

In this installment, I get one of the microcontrollers set up on breadboards and get it to, at last, fulfill its purpose and BLINK AN LED!

Rescuing vintage microcontrollers part 2: Can it work?

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In the first installment of this series, I found some decades-old Signetics SCN8031AH and OKI MSM83C154 microcontrollers in a drawer, and decided, without really putting detailed thought into it, that it should be possible to drive a scrolling sign made of WS2812s strips with them, much like Josh Levine does here, with an Arduino.

Before I embark on putting together hardware and writing software, though, it would probably be a good idea to do some back-of-the-envelope calculations to check that this can actually work. Are these 40-year-old components actually fast enough to communicate with modern LED controllers?

Rescuing the makerspace's vintage microcontrollers

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I recently joined my local makerspace, and one of the exciting¹ things there is this shelf of electronic components, available for all members to use:

I felt a bit like an archeologist going through these. Everything in them, apart from some Arduinos and Raspberry Pi related stuff in the middle shelves, seems to be at least thirty years old! There’s the usual selection of resistors, capacitors, transistors, and other small through-hole components. Among the more complex things, a lot seems to be loosely audio-related - amps, signal generators and the like (I bet someone could make some cool synths!). There are a load of old-school UV-light-erasable EPROMs.

What interested me most, though, was a huge stash of PLCC ICs. Just look at this!