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Showing posts from October, 2024

IM53 8080 birthday cake

 Each year I've been trying to get more creative with ideas for Spencer's birthday cake. The plan this year was to incorporate LEDs in place of candles. I eventually settled on an Altair / IMSAI / PDP -style computer since those are the type of computers that inspired his RC2014. The IMSAI 8080 has the most colourful switches as well as a name that I could twist. The thought that it could show randomly flashing lights (as if the computer were running) and that it could also play a game of 'kill the bit' was very appealing. A plan formed to use a capacitive touch pad on the cake itself. The first job is to bake the fruitcake. I often use a 7" square tin and one of those cut in half and rearranged makes a cake of suitable proportions.  Even after taking a slice off the faces to make them nice and square, there are still some rounded corners, so after putting on the marzipan, I used more marzipan as a filler to flatten the whole thing. Even though I wanted to end up w