Hackaday Prize 2023: Scratch Made 8-Bit Educational Computer

May 29, 2023 by Joseph Long 6 Comments

To demonstrate the functionality of an 8-bit computer processor at a very basic level, [Mazen Gomaa] assembled a Homemade 8-Bit Educational Computer using common CMOS logic chips, a handful of prototyping boards, and an impressive number of carefully connected wires. [Mazen] was inspired by Ben Eater’s 8-bit TTL Breadboard Computer but opted to solder the chips and other components onto proto boards instead of using solderless breadboards.

The 8-Bit computer is based on the Simple-As-Possible (SAP) computer architecture described in the book “Digital Computer Electronics” by [Paul Malvino] and [Jerald Brown]. These useful educational examples demonstrate data, computer logic, and even programming in the context of basic electronic components. Tinkering with such simple computers provides a real “zeros and ones” exposure to computation.

[Mazen] added some additional features and functionality to his computer, including an instruction keypad, an address keypad, a dot matrix memory data viewer, a Schottky diode matrix ROM, and a boot loader that initializes the RAM with data stored in ROM. With clock speeds up to 100 Hz, the computer consumes around 300-500 mA of current.

Future plans include expanding the memory and instruction set from the present 128-bit (8×16) RAM, 64-bit (8×8) ROM, and a set of ten instructions. Already, this project is a great addition to an ever-growing catalog of homemade solderless breadboard computers, LCD snake games, and VGA video cards.

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The Voltaic Pile: Building The First Battery

May 25, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 10 Comments

In the technologically-underpinned modern world, most of us interact with a battery of some sort every day. Whether that’s the starter battery in a car, the lithium battery in a phone, or even just the coin cell battery in a wrist watch, batteries underpin a lot of what makes society possible now. Not so in the early 1800s when chemists and physicists were first building and experimenting with batteries. And those batteries were enormous, non-rechargable, and fairly fragile to boot. Not something suited for powering much of anything, but if you want to explore what it would have been like to use one of these devices, follow along with [Christopher]’s build of a voltaic pile. Continue reading “The Voltaic Pile: Building The First Battery” →

Prototyping The Prototype

November 29, 2022 by Bryan Cockfield 28 Comments

For basic prototyping, the go-to tool to piece together a functioning circuit is the breadboard. It’s a great way to prove a concept works before spending money and time on a PCB. For more complex tasks we can make use of simulation software such as SPICE. But there hasn’t really been a tool to blend these two concepts together. That’s what CRUMB is hoping to solve as a tool that allows simulating breadboard circuits.

Currently, most basic circuit functions are working for version 1.0. This includes passive components like resistors, capacitors, switches, some LEDs, and potentiometers, as well as some active components like transistors and diodes. There are some logic chips available such as 74XX series chips and 555 timers, which opens up a vast array of circuit building. There’s even an oscilloscope feature, plus audio output to incorporate buzzers into the circuit simulation. Currently in development is an LCD display module and improvements to the oscilloscope.

Besides prototyping, this could be useful for anyone, students included, who is learning about circuits without the need to purchase any hardware. The major downside to this project is that it there doesn’t seem to have a free or trial version, the source is not available, and it’s only for sale on Steam, Apple Store, and Google Play. That being said, there is a forum available for users to discuss problems and needs for future versions, so it’s possible that a community could build up around it. We’ve seen previously non-free versions of circuit simulation software become more open after some time, so it’s not out of the realm of possibility.

Thanks to [Thomas] for the tip!

DIY Wind Tunnel Aims To Educate The Youth

October 1, 2022 by Lewin Day 18 Comments

Typically, when we talk about wind tunnels, we think of the big facilities in use by the aerospace and motorsports industries. However, there’s nothing stopping you building a wind tunnel of your very own, and it may even be easier than you think! [Jude Pullen] has whipped up just such a design with DIY in mind.

Intended for high school Design & Technology (D&T) classes, it uses relatively simple materials construction techniques. The airflow straightener is built out of PVC pipes, and the end boxes built out of cardboard. The transparent walls for observation are created out of acrylic, while a simple fan provides the necessary flow. The desk-sized wind tunnel can then be instrumented with a manometer, tachometer, and anemometer to measure pressure, fan speed, and wind speed. [Jude] also explores experiments that can be run in the wind tunnel, such as working with a small balsa wood glider and measuring the lift it generates with a scale.

[Jude] has a very pragmatic and real-world understanding of such projects, too. He notes the difference between making things to measure, and making them to fit, and highlights the values of both approaches. It’s a much more holistic approach than simply berating students to “do it right” or “do it better” when making things in a D&T class.

Use of a basic wind tunnel is often not taught to engineering students until at least the second or third year of an engineering degree, after all the boring math and static analysis has been dealt with. However, there’s no reason high school physics students can’t understand the physics involved, and they’re more than capable of undertaking such a build. Starting such education early often nets huge benefits for individuals and their eventual careers.

Once you’ve got yourself a wind tunnel, you might want to start thinking about some flow visualization, which gets really exciting.

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Color(ing) Computer Needs No Batteries

May 18, 2022 by Al Williams 3 Comments

While Radio Shack did have the Color Computer, we don’t think they had this in mind. [Pepepépepe] has some coloring book pages and simple rules that let you simulate logic circuits using a crayon. The downloadable ‘zine has hand-written instructions and several examples.

Keep in mind, this is a computer in the same way the old logic kits in the 1960s were computers. They are really demonstrations of digital logic circuits. To work the “computers”, you pick two colors, one for a square and the other for a circle. You color pathways until you reach a “nory.” The nory, which looks suspiciously like a slingshot with eyes, has a special rule. If both branches of the nory have your circle color on them, the output of the nory will be the square color. Otherwise, the color coming out is the circle color.

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An ATTiny board that one of the students developed for this project, etched on single-sided FR4.

Electronics And C++ Education With An ATTiny13

May 14, 2022 by Arya Voronova 28 Comments

When [Adam, HA8KDA] is not busy with his PhD studies, he mentors a group of students interested in engineering. To teach them a wide range of topics, he set out to build a small and entertaining embedded project as they watch and participate along the way. With this LED-adorned ATTiny13A project, [Adam] demonstrated schematic and PCB design, then taught C++ basics and intricacies – especially when it comes to building low-footprint software – and tied it all together into a real-world device students could take home after the project. His course went way beyond the “Hello world”s we typically expect, and some of us can only wish for a university experience like this.

He shares the PCB files and software with us, but also talks about the C++20 framework he’s developed for this ATTiny. The ATTiny13A is very cheap, and also very limited – you get 1K of ROM and 64 bytes of RAM. This framework lets you make good use of it, providing the basics like GPIO wiggling, but also things like low-power operation hooks, soft PWM with optional multi-phase operation support and EEPROM access. Students could write their own animations for this device, and he includes them in the repo, too!

In educational projects, it pays to keep code direct and clean, cruft-less and accessible to students. These are the things you can only achieve when you truly understand the tools you’re working with, which is the perfect position for teaching about them! [Adam] intends to show that C++ is more than suitable for low-resource devices, and tells us about the EEPROM class code he wrote – compiling into the same amount of instructions as an Assembly implementation and consuming the same amount of RAM, while providing compile-time checks and fail-safe syntax.

We’ve talked about using C++ on microcontrollers before, getting extra compile-time features without overhead, and this project illustrates the concept well. [Adam] asks us all, and especially our fellow C++ wizards, for our opinions on the framework he designed. Could you achieve even more with this simple hardware – make the code more robust, clean, have it do more within the limited resources?

What could you build with an ATTiny13, especially with such a framework? A flashy hairclip wearable, perhaps, or a code-learning RF-remote-controlled outlet. We’ve also seen a tiny camera trigger for endurance races,, a handheld Flappy Bird-like console, and many more!

Two pairs of boards described in the article, with toggle switches and RCA jacks, shown interconnected, LEDs on all four boards lit up.

Boards For Playful Exploration Of Digital Protocols

April 10, 2022 by Arya Voronova 1 Comment

Teaching people efficiently isn’t limited to transmitting material from one head to another — it’s also about conveying the principles that got us there. [Mara Bos] shows us a toolkit (Twitter,
nitter link) that you can arm your students with, creating a small playground where, given a set of constraints, they can invent and figure communication protocols out on their own.

This tool is aimed to teach digital communication protocols from a different direction. We all know that UART, I2C, SPI and such have different use cases, but why? Why are baud rates important? When are clock or chip select lines useful? What’s the deal with the start bit? We kinda sorta figure out the answers to these on our own by mental reverse-engineering, but these things can be taught better, and [Mara] shows us how.

Gently guided by your observations and insights, your students will go through defining new and old communication standards from the ground up, rediscovering concepts like acknowledge bits, bus contention, or even DDR. And, as you point out that the tricks they just discovered have real-world counterparts, you will see the light bulb go on in their head — realizing that they, too, could be part of the next generation of engineers that design the technologies of tomorrow.

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