The Homemade CPU

[Lewis]

Big Mess of Wires" Homemade CPU is Just That

Posted 05/28/09 at 02:45:29 PM by Paul Lilly

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Taking DIY to a whole new level, Steve Chamberlin, a Belmont, California, videogame developer, rolled his own 8-bit CPU for an aptly named project he calls "Big Mess of Wires," or BMOW. The project took him 18 months, $1,000, and 1,253 wires to complete.

"Computers can seem like complete black boxes," Chamberlin said. "We understand what they do, but not how they do it, really. When I was finally able to mentally connect the dots all the way from the physics of a transistor up to a functioning computer, it was an incredible thrill."

The project began with a 12x7-inch Augat wire-wrap board with 2,832 gold wire-wrap posts purchased on Ebay for $50. Over time, BMOW came to encompass 1,253 pieces of wire painstakingly wrapped at a rate of 25 wires per hour to create 2.506 individually wrapped connections. More than just a prototype, Chamberlin has added a keyboard, LCD output, USB connection, three-voice audio, and VGA video to demonstrate a working computer.

For those of you in the San Mateo area, Chamberlin's BMOW will be on display at the fourth annual Makert Faire this weekend, May 30-31, as one of 600 DIY exhibits.

 

[jasoncran]

what the purpose of that to teach the basics of electronics,

shoot i dont have a degree in computer science, yet the basics of the electronics of a car i know and i have an ase in that one. the ecm has a lot of the same things that pc has, albeit slower and no cards or addons.

But they are eeproms, the exact same as flashing the bios,
clocks speed, analog to digital converters and vice versa, non violatile memory ( also known as keep alive memory) and violatile memory.

the same problems with esd.

mulitplexing is the same, some cars uses fiber optics.
the sensor uses a 5v reference.

anyway wonder what the speed of that thing is in computing.

jason

 

[Lewis]

I think that it was great thing that he did.

 

[jasoncran]

no doubt kinda of a throw back to the eniac 1000 days.

jason