Electron Ultra
November 2025 - 'Electron Ultra' is the new name for my Electron Clone. I was never happy calling it a clone as it's not an exact copy or replica. It's more an amalgamation of my favourite Electron add-ons in an attempt to make it more reliable and compact.
This final version adds the PiTubeDirect interface to the main PCB. It wasn't easy to find space for the additional parts but I managed to squeeze it all in just beside cartridge slot 6/7.
So the Electron Ultra board now looks like this:
I've coloured an overlay to show each add-on:
Since the case was designed there's been quite a few additions to the Ultra's PCB so it's time to update it with a refresh of the labelling.
The three PCB designs will soon be sent off for manufacture...
And they're here..
Preparing the base and the few extras needed, the speaker, PSU and an RGBtoHDMI.
It took a full day to assemble the board, this time I used turned pin IC sockets and I'm short of the cassette DIN socket. The PiTubeDirect components and the Raspberry Pi socket can be seen just below the lower cartridge socket.
First test and it's looking good but I did find some problems later in the testing...
The first fault I found was this..
In MODE 3 and 0 the characters were tearing, after some investigation I found the solution was to replace the 74S04 in the clock circuit.
The next test was the Econet and that worked fine.
Now on to testing the User Ports, Analogue Port and the Raspberry Pi second processor.
This is where I found the second problem. The 2nd processor would only run reliably when the Electron was in 'Standard' mode. After a lot of head scratching I found I had made a mistake on the PiTubeDirect header. Pin 17 on the Raspberry Pi GPIO is 3V3 and I had connected this to 5V causing all sorts of problems with the level shifters. Unfortunately there is nothing I can do with the PCB to fix it so the easiest solution was to simply remove the pin from the Raspberry Pi header.
With that sorted everything is working great. I have updated the circuit and PCB layouts if I need to order any in future.
This is the new top for the case, I have removed all the superfluous text to keep it clean and simple.
I updated the case for my version 3 Electron Ultra so this is my setup now. Left to right - the v3 Electron Ultra with the PiTubeDirect Cartridge, the BBC B+ and v4 Electron Ultra with the built in PiTubeDirect, all networked.
-END-