A COMPUTER THAT

IS READY WHEN YOU ARE.

Ask somebody to explain automation and they will hand you a board, a cable and a two-hour install. Ask a ZX Spectrum and it simply switches on.

That is the whole thought behind MUMIO. Underneath the rubber keys sits an eight-bit processor, forty-eight kilobytes of memory, a BASIC interpreter burned into ROM and an expansion bus brought out to the back of the case. Put like that, it is not far from a modern microcontroller board — except it has no boot sequence to sit through and nothing to install.

So we built peripherals for it. Sensors, displays, motors, servos, relays, clocks, joystick interfaces — arranged the way Arduino arranges shields, but driven from BASIC.

TWO KEYWORDS.
THAT IS THE WHOLE API.

Every MUMIO device answers to OUT and IN. One line of code and ENTER is enough to make something move, light up or report a number back.

There is no compile step, no upload, no serial monitor. The distance between having an idea and watching it happen is about four seconds — and for anybody learning, that distance decides whether they carry on or quietly give up.

Adapters bring SPI, I²C and RS-232 within reach, so the same Spectrum can drive thousands of modules built for entirely different decades.

UP TO 256 CARDS,
ONE BUS.

Each card carries an address set on an eight-position switch, anywhere from 0 to 255. Chain them together and every one answers to its own number, so a single Spectrum can hold a surprisingly large experiment.

The I/O card keeps the machine’s bus safely at arm’s length. You never need to know how the edge connector is wired, or what the Z80 is doing underneath — which was always the idea.

HOW IT STACKS UP

The I/O card plugs into the edge connector; MUMIO devices mount on top of it. Each card takes its own port address, so several can share the same bus without arguing.

EASIER THAN
ARDUINO.

Not a slogan — a claim we are happy to be held to. Comparable capability, far less ceremony. Learn the concepts in BASIC on a machine that is ready the moment it is powered, and moving on to C on a microcontroller becomes a step rather than a cliff. From there it is a short road to work in automation and robotics, which is where several of the people we have taught ended up.

AND THEN THERE ARE THE GAMES

It would be dishonest to pretend this is only a teaching platform. The Spectrum carried thousands of games, and they are all still there — in .TAP and .TZX files, a search away, free as the day the magazines stopped printing.

The same machine that reads a temperature sensor on Tuesday afternoon runs Manic Miner on Tuesday evening. We have never seen a reason to treat those as different activities.

A Spectrum game can be finished in an hour, which people sometimes mistake for a shortcoming. It takes many hours of practice, stubbornness and swearing to reach the point where an hour is enough.

That was always the arrangement, and the satisfaction waiting on the other side of it is the thing modern games, for all their scale, rarely hand you.

THE MODULES

Five boards exist so far — I/O port, joystick interface, real-time clock, serial interface and a diagnostic ROM. All are off sale while we redraw them around one problem: making it safe to connect and disconnect things from a live machine.

SEE THE RANGE →

THE COMPUTER

And because running any of this on a forty-four-year-old machine is increasingly a lottery, we build a new one. Same logic, current components, assembled and tested by hand — the ZX Spectrum Neo.

SEE THE NEO →