Photos

Project/Workbench

Starting from the top left, we have a full 4 bit adder with carry built with discrete logic gates (one of my first circuits ever!). Next up, we have a FIFO memory chip with a binary counter for psuedo-inputs. Next to that is a ATMega328P running on a breadboard that drives a 5x7 matrix display. On the next row, we have a 74181 ALU, the Z-80 NOP computer, and a Raspberry Pi Pico/74HC595 based Night Rider (3D Printed Case). On the next row, we have a few circuits that are part of my Oscillator Investigations series. This includes Sine/Cosine/Square/Sawtooth/Triangle wave generators fed into op-amp based integrators and differentiators, a soft-fading LED blinker with latching button states, a Scmhitt Trigger, and a Colpitts oscillator configuration. Next to that is my 6502 breadboard computer, a 1 Bit CPU (MC14500B), and a HM6264 SRAM testing circuit with a tristate buffer and some glue logic to handle output states. You can watch me dive into each and every one of these circuits in more detail on my Youtube Channel (opens in a new tab).

Below, you could see my MCU/SBC collection on the frontal lefthand side. In the middle, we have a few random projects such as the Christmas Tree, Sand Timer, Night Rider (ATTiny85 and 2x74HC595 Based), a clock, a logic gate board implemented with discrete transistors, and my Arduino RP2040 based web server/IoT device. Moving to the righthand side, you can see my LED Cube collection, starting with 2 3x3x3s, a 4x4x4, and the massive 8x8x8! Finally, at the frontal righthand side, we have the transmitter end of a teeny tiny ATTiny85 based control system setup to trigger ambient lighting in my room. I will be uploading a video covering this in depth very soon! Again, see my Youtube Channel (opens in a new tab) for demonstrations of these projects!

CPU/Stuff Collection

We have an AMD 4 bit RAM chip from 1982, a vaccum tube, 2 PGA Pentium 4s, an original Pentium from 1992, a random Xenon, a Z-80, an Intel EPROM, and an LGA Pentium 4.

Arduino Uno Mini Limited

Thanks, Arduino!

Raspberry Pi 4

This is my Raspberry Pi 4 with a 52Pi Ice Tower cooler and a 5V Noctua fan for added overkill! It is the 4GB Ram variant with a slight overclock and bootloader set to a small 64GB USB 3.0 drive. I usually use it with a PiHat that my friend gave me to read from a multitude of sensors/play with an LED matrix, a monolith to code ARM assembly, or for some fun emulating retro games on RetroPi! I briefly used it as a Minecraft server just to test it out, and hope to create a k8s cluster like Jeff Geerling (opens in a new tab) one day!

Microcenter Run!

Went to Microcenter with my friend on 1/5/2024. His haul included the Microcenter exclusive AMD 5600X3D with a whopping 96MB of L3 cache, an ASRock B550 Micro ATX motherboard, a Lian Li 205M case, and a spare fan. I picked up a set of 10 NTE RGB LEDs, a CD4094 output shift register, and a Thermaltake UX200 SE ARGB CPU Cooler cooler for my homeserver! These are just some pics of what I ended up doing with the stuff I got! You can read a bit more into the specs on my homeserver here (opens in a new tab).

Temperatures stay in the low 20s with an Express server, PHP-FPM/Nginx proxy, Discord music bot, KF2 server, and web crawler running. Under synthetic stress, it didn't even hit 35C!

And over here we have the CD4094 setup with debounced pushbuttons (pulled low) hooked up to the clock and data lines. LEDs are hooked up with resistors to the outputs so we can shift data and make cool 8 bit patterns like this. (NES controller connected to this soon?)

Z-80 Test Build

A Z-80 configured as a 4 bit counter by utilizing pulldown resistors as a psuedo-rom. The resistors set the value 0 on each address pin, rendering each memory location as a NOP command. This causes the PC to increment infintely.

6502 Breadboard Computer

A fully functional 6502 breadboard computer inspired by Ben Eater. More can be see about this here (opens in a new tab).