Fresh hacks every day
[Chris] over at PyroElectro is getting into the swing of the holidays with a LED Christmas tree build. Unlike the other electrical Christmas trees we’ve seen this holiday season, [Chris] designed his tree entirely with digital logic – no microcontrollers included.
The tree [Chris] constructed on a piece of perf board is a beautiful spiral arrangement of 64 green … Read the rest
For this year’s 7400 logic competition, [Nick] decided to build an FPGA out of logic chips.
Perhaps a short explanation is in order to fully appreciate [Nick]‘s work. The basic component of an FPGA is a slice, or cell, that performs boolean operations on its input and sends the result on its output. The core of these slices is … Read the rest
Homebrew CPUs made out of logic chips are nothing new, but a homebrew FPGA is another matter entirely. [Joshua] sent in a project he whipped up where he made a single logic cell FPGA.
Despite how complicated and intimidating they are in practice, FPGAs are really very simple. They’re made of thousands of logic blocks capable of transmuting into … Read the rest
Aside from wanting to play around with nitric acid, [Ben] really didn’t have a reason to decap a few 74xx and 4000-series logic chips. Not that we mind, as he provides a great tutorial at looking at a bare IC that isn’t covered in epoxy and resin.
Most ICs are encased in a hard epoxy shell making it very … Read the rest
In 1975, [D. L. Slotnick], CS professor at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign faced a problem: meteorologists were collecting a lot more data than current weather simulations could handle. [Slotnick]‘s solution was to build a faster computer to run these atmosphere circulation simulations. The only problem was the computer needed to be built quickly and cheaply, so that meant using … Read the rest
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