Retrotechtacular: Donner 3500 portable analog computer

retrotechtacular-donner3500

What if we told you we had a computer you can take with you? What if it only weighed 28 pounds? This is a pretty hard sell when today you can get a 1.5 GHz quad-core processor packing computer to carry in your pocket which weighs less than 5 ounces. But back in the day the Donner 3500 was something … Read the rest

Breadboard friendly FPGAs

fpga

Regular Hackaday readers will be familiar with all the cool things you can do with FPGAs; emulating old video game consoles, cracking encryption protocols, and DIY logic analyzers become relatively simple projects with even a modest FPGA dev board on your workbench. Many FPGA boards aren’t geared towards prototyping, though, and breadboard friendly devices are hard to come by. Here’s … Read the rest

Make dual pin header footprints into breadboard friendly DIP

[John] wrote in with a solution to a prototyping issue that has vexed us for quite some time. Above you can see the DIP friendly solution for dual-row pin headers which he came up with. With just a bit of easy soldering he now has a breadboard friendly device for prototyping.

He starts by soldering a dual row pin header … Read the rest

Breadboarding with a 144-core processor

At the center of that green PCB is a tiny little processor with way too many cores. It’s the GA144 which was taken for a test-drive on a breadboard by [Andrew Back]. We saw a multi-core Kickstarter project last month. This will cost a lot less and get you more than twice the number of cores. But as was mentioned … Read the rest

Breadboarding a 4-bit ALU

[TGTTGIT] recently took the plunge and decided to build his own computer using logic chips. He just completed a 4-bit ALU which can compute 18 functions. It took a long time to get the wiring right, but in true geek fashion his build was accompanied by an alternating Chapelle’s Show and Star Trek: TNG marathon playing in the background.… Read the rest

The easiest way to dive in to ARM programming

[Brad] has been very excited about an ARM Cortex-M0 chip released by NXP; it’s a fully featured ARM microcontroller, and is, quite amazingly, stuffed into a hobbyist and breadboard-friendly DIP-28 package. After finding a supplier for this chip, [Brad] dove in and put together a great tutorial for programming an ARM on the breadboard using open source tools.

The … Read the rest

ProtoSynth, the prototyping synthesizer

This project isn’t really a prototype, but a tool for prototyping. [Tymkrs] came up with a unique way to build this synthesizer prototyping tool. They actually patched into the underside of the breadboards in order to keep all of the permanent bits nice and tidy.

In the clip after the break you’ll see all of the build photos that … Read the rest