A place to learn about coding, making things, and stuff that strikes my fancy.
One thing about my "Introduction to Digital Computers" series I wanted to verify was that all the circuits designed in the series in fact works correctly. And one aspect of that--which we introduced in the first part of the fourth video--was the complete ALU. While I've taken the liberty to do some minor redesigns (so... Continue Reading →
Okay, this took much longer than I wanted it to. But finally the fourth video for our Introduction to Digital Computer series! In this fourth video I start to tie the pieces together. We first finish the Arithmetic Logic Unit, then we tie it in with six registers: an accumulator, flag register, and four general... Continue Reading →
So here's a quick little Arduino project which combines an Ethernet shield, a display shield and an Arduino-compatible Adafruit Metro to display the current weather and forecast. The goal of this project was to pull weather data from a remote server (in this case, the DarkSky API) to display the current temperature, weather and a... Continue Reading →
So here's where the next video stands. First, as I noted in a previous blog post, I've settled on an 8080-like MPU with 6 8-bit registers and an internal 8-bit bus. Now to make an internal 8-bit bus work, you nee a tri-state gate, a logic circuit which can be used to disconnect our logic... Continue Reading →
So one of my goals of my series "Introduction To Digital Computers" is to show the design of a computer that can be built entirely out of NPN transistors. The idea is that by showing the design of a digital computer from the absolute ground up--from something you can hold in your hands rather than... Continue Reading →
I originally planned to try to get this video out by the end of October. But I just returned from a two week trip to Spain and the south of France--and before I release a video which starts to tie together the registers developed in the third video with the arithmetic logic in the second... Continue Reading →
It's been about a month, and here's the third video explaining how computers work from the ground up. In this third video I discuss flip flops. Starting with two not gates hooked together I discuss how a bi-stable circuit operates, extend this using NOR gates to Set/Reset flip flops, build data flip flops, edge-triggered data... Continue Reading →
I feel like, with making the first two "Introduction to Digital Computers" videos I've gained a superpower. And I've used that power to help me visualize and solve another problem I was having, figuring out the shape of spur gears (and eventually, internal spur gears, the next major feature I'd like to add to the... Continue Reading →
I've come to realize making something from scratch winds up building a bunch of prototypes as you both perfect the plans and figure out how to make the parts. And in my case, while the plans may be great--my ability to machine parts is... shall we say questionable? At any rate, I have a second... Continue Reading →
