As soon as I had a working Compac, I built like ten of them and took them home to run overnight where I could observe performance. It was fun having that many flashy lights in the room all night.

I meant that too though, that the flashy light part was the fun part. Power was fairly straightforward (when I finally got it working, the production version was by no means the first draft) and chip comms were very straightforward, but the flashy lights part was fun. It's actually got a double NFET inverter triggered off the RX line, where the second FET has a parallel RC on the gate to hold it high longer and that's what kicks the R and B elements in the RGB LED to make the white-ish flash. Without that the flash would be imperceptibly fast since a share return is like 5 bytes at 115kbaud. So it's not complex at all, but I like to think it's at least clever.

The Terminus uses a similar circuit, but instead of the RGB LED it's got a discrete blue LED and discrete white LEDs that flash. That way there's no weirdness going on with white-balance. Keeps it consistent. And also dead sexy.

Additionally, to stay on the subject of selling 2Pacs and whatever, I shipped out more orders today. We're operating out of standing stock right now so orders are shipped "immediately". I put that in quotes because I only actually send out packages on Tuesday and Friday.