For a long time, I've had small (and temporary) model railways.
This project is a DCC decoder, with some slightly unusual features - most notably two track inputs, rather than one. The reason for this is that I'm very interested in automation, and some automation related features can work significantly …
For a challenge, I thought it'd be interesting to try to build a generic MIFARE CRYPTO1 driver that can be easily ported between RFID transceiver ICs.
It should be noted that MIFARE Classic is considered very insecure at this point and should not be used for anything security-sensitive, but it's …
A long time ago, I built some projects using the (then) Dallas Semiconductor 1-Wire interface.
Although this isn't an interface I generally use much today, I thought it'd be fun to build a USB to 1-Wire interface.
However, when I started designing it, I realised that I could add a …
Even though they're quite dated now, I often quite like using "HD44780" (or compatible) LCD modules in projects I build.
They're fairly easy to drive, inexpensive and very readily available.
However, there are a few attributes which are less convenient:
Another processor module, but this time a less successful one - a board based around the Intel i960 (specifically the 80960SA / 80960SB). The i960 is one of the more challenging processors I've worked with, for a few reasons:
Of all of the modular CPU boards, this is probably the one I'm most excited to have built - it's able to boot DOS (on a "real" processor, unlike Modular CPU Platform - Update 1 !
(the 8086 board has a few functional issues …
When I was designing the PC104 Dragonball project, I wanted to design a simple (cheap!) PC104-based module to check I'd got the footprint and mechanical properties correct.
This project is based around the RTL8019AS ISA Ethernet Controller. It's mostly very similar to a very typical RTL8019 reference design, but …
I'm not certain why, but I've seen very few hobbyist projects based around the early MIPS processors.
MIPS-1 is a very interesting architecture, for a few reasons:
It's been a while since I posted an update about the modular CPU project - here's the latest status.
It can boot DOS!
Not particularly well at the moment - the 8086 board isn't functional at the moment, so I'm using the MCL86 Verilog 8086 core. This works, but …
While I was debugging another project (an 80486GX processor board for the modular_cpu project), I found I needed a way to capture the internal signals of the FPGA. While some Lattice parts do support their "Reveal" logic analyser, I'm using the open-source Yosys based toolchain, so I can't use …
This project is nowhere near finished, but as it's taking up a lot of my free time at the moment, I thought I'd add a quick website update in case any of the work-in-progress ideas are useful.
For a long time, I've been interested in processors, and as someone …
This was a project to add a number of PC compatible devices in a PC104 form factor module:
This project is based around the Winbond …
To balance out the complexity of the last project, here's a very simple (but useful) project that doesn't have any active components at all.
When working with telecoms equipment, it's very common to need to connect RJ45 (8P8C) or RJ12 (6P6C) connectors.
Although it's possible to buy patch cables and …
From time to time I like building retrocomputing projects based on old CPUs, and I decided that the 68K would be a fun challenge.
The "DragonBall" is a very interesting SoC based around a 68000, with some useful peripherals added:
Additionally …