I’m starting to fear that Tiny CPU is a short-sighted design. It occupies a strange spot between ultra-simple soft-CPUs like MCPU, and much more capable soft-CPUs like PicoBlaze. The hardware is nearly as complex as PicoBlaze, but the functionality is…
Hot diggity damn, it works! It took me about four hours to fully assemble the Tiny CPU test board with all the components, which was good soldering practice. The surface-mounted navigation switch was a little challenging, but not too bad.…
My “Tiny Board Test” custom-designed PCB is here! The BatchPCB order took 18 days from design submission to delivery, but it seemed like an eternity. It’s pretty awesome to see my ideas rendered in copper and fiberglass. Somebody might even…
Lots of good news on the Tiny CPU front! I successfully programmed a Flash ROM via the JTAG indirect method today. Woohoo! I was never able to get it to work previously, and couldn’t figure out why. Several possibilities: Comically…
Ah, Maker Faire. It’s part garage inventions, part Burning Man reruns, part techno-supermarket, and all awesome. Can it possibly be a year already since Maker Faire 2009, where BMOW was featured in Wired, Slashdot, Digg, etc. and I talked myself…
In my ongoing effort to make the Tiny CPU board as small as possible, I’m looking for a small Flash ROM or EEPROM. That’s small in physical size, not necessarily capacity. My search has led me to examine many different…
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…
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