Random project for a Saturday afternoon: a guitar amp in a Cheetos Crunchy can. I followed a modified version of Make Magazine’s cracker box amp design, which uses an LM386 power amplifier and a few passive components. The amp has…
I’ve decided to make a simpler prototype board before advancing to the final Tiny CPU system boards. This will give me a chance to get more familiar with using Eagle, create a circuit board, get it manufactured, and verify that…
I spent a little time evaluating Eagle and KiCad, two well-regarded pcb design tools for hobbyists, to see which one would best meet my needs for Tiny CPU’s board design. As a complete beginner who’s never made any kind of…
A fantasy-land for hardware nerds like me is hidden in a former Silicon Graphics building in Mountain View, California. Despite living only a few miles away from the Computer History Museum, somehow I’d never found the time to visit there…
With the design of the Tiny CPU core more or less finished, I’ve started thinking about how to build a small computer around it. My goal is to create a simple machine with a keyboard input, a 4-line LCD output,…
My analysis of the advantages of fixed-size instructions proved to be badly flawed. The improvements I saw when switching to a 16-bit fixed instruction size were not what I originally thought: the size and speed gains came from the reduction…
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