Hardware Glitches
Just after I wrote last week’s entry, the hardware went from proudly proclaiming “BMOW is alive!” to merely stating “BMOW is aliv”. I was able to track this down to a problem with the program counter chip. Often, but not…
Just after I wrote last week’s entry, the hardware went from proudly proclaiming “BMOW is alive!” to merely stating “BMOW is aliv”. I was able to track this down to a problem with the program counter chip. Often, but not…

Everything seems to be falling into place now. I think a picture says it best: The LCD is up and running, displaying messages from the ROM program. I wasn’t lucky enough to have it work on the first try this…

It works!!! Eureka! And on the very first attempt, no less. I have achieved computation from a big mess o’ wires, and a couple of dozen basic logic chips. I can now say confidently that fibonacci(12) = 144. Check out…
I’m getting very close to the first real BMOW bootup. I’ve got two data registers wired up, along with enough of the data bus to use them. Now I just need to double-check the current wiring, add the rest of…

Believe it or not, I think this pig may actually fly! Things are starting to get interesting. After several more days of wiring, I’ve reached the point where I can execute straight line code (no branches or jumps), with no…

Ugh, I’ve run into my first design flaw. Fortunately, I don’t think it will be too difficult to fix, but it’s an eye opener nonetheless. The issue I’m facing is fanout limitations. Fanout is the number of inputs that are…
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