Inspiration for creating application

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I have been repairing Commodore 64/128 computers for some years, but I still consider myself as a beginner in this world of hardware, and as you probably can guess (since I did this application) then I am more a software person. The hardware side of things is really relaxing for me, focussing on some physical hardware, troubleshooting, soldering, replacing and seeing a broken machine being revived is just so satisfying, so this is a must-have for me to relax a little from all my software projects 😁

For my repairs I always forget where and what to check, and I struggle to find again all the relevant ressources and schematics to check, not to mention how to find the components in the schematics. I did often refer to the "Mainboards" section of My Old Computer, and I noticed that Jeroen did have a prototype of an application named Repair Help, and it did have the easy layout I was looking for. However, it was never finalized from his side, so I took upon myself to create something similar, and a couple of years later (a lot of hiatus) I did come up with a very similar looking Windows application named Commodore Repair Toolbox (CRT).

After a year with CRT and due to several questions about "is it Windows only", then I investigated if it was realistic for me to do a native porting to other systems. As I in the same time wanted to explore vibe-coding with the new LLM models, then I decided to give it a go... a complete rewrite based on a new platform (Avalonia), giving me a great opportunity to lurk out previous design flaws in the old project, which was almost completely "hand-written". So, here we are now with a completely new project and natively supporting Windows, Linux and macOS - nice.