Kempston joystick interface
Why the Kempston interface mattered if you owned an original Spectrum, a birthday-money joystick disaster from October 1985, and a homebrew rebuild for a fraction of the 1985 price.
Datel Robotek: A Recreated Robot Control Card for the ZX Spectrum
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Datel Robotek was an obscure official interface for driving simple robots from Spectrum BASIC, sold alongside the book Make and Program Your Own Robots (bibliographic entry and PDF), which walked through a whole set of BASIC-controlled robot projects built around it. Original boards have been effectively unobtainable for decades. This build is a recreation, reconstructed from the original published schematics and corrected against errors found in that original documentation — see the original Datel Robotek listing at Spectrum Computing for the historical background. PCB artwork for this recreation is by Bora Yurtoren.
Build notes
Every component on this board is through-hole, and part numbers and orientations are printed directly on the silkscreen, which makes assembly straightforward. The one real sourcing snag is the relays (TRKM S-Z L05V) that drive the robot outputs — they're not stocked by the usual Western component distributors, and are only readily available from AliExpress or eBay sellers based in China. Order those first; everything else is common passives.
Build video
Build video coming soon
Component list
| Component | Qty | Notes | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Datel Robotek interface PCB | 1 | Shared design — order directly from the PCBWay project page | PCBWay |
| TRKM S-Z L05V relays | 4 | Robot output drivers — sourcing bottleneck, AliExpress/eBay only | |
| Remaining through-hole passives and connectors | 1 | All part-numbered on the silkscreen — no exotic parts beyond the relays above |