I started this project in January of 2021 when I came across a playlist on the YouTube channel by Ben Eater, Building an 8-bit Breadboard Computer. I watched the first couple videos or so and I was hooked. Immediately after watching the videos on simple latches and his clock module, I ran over to Jameco and bought a few chips. I needed to do this along with him.
I ended up watching most of his series before I even got my first order. I felt like I was on a rocket of learning and getting so inspired.
When it finally came, I was off to the races. Spent most of the first night now knowing much about breadboards, power, most components, or really anything.
As I continued further into the project, I found an awesome subreddit for all of the Ben Eater followers (r/beneater,) and boy, was I in awe. I had no clue so many other people were doing this. I didn’t even have to ask myself for help but just had to look at the plethora of content. I treated it like the “Ben Eater After-School Program”.
After a few months, I already had a much stronger understanding of all things digital logic chips, passive components, schematics, Gerber files, etc… Heck, my home office turned into a computer hardware tinkerer’s office faster than I could have imagined.
To name a few products or sites that really helped me out early in this project:
- Software that helped me remember and plan my circuits. This was before I really understood schematics. I used this to post pictures with questions too https://fritzing.org/
- Simulate actual circuits right in the browser. https://falstad.com/
- Create Circuit Schematics and PCB Layouts https://www.kicad.org/
Fast forward a few months, I started to branch off of Ben’s channel and start to find others such as James Shamon‘s 8-bit Pipelined CPU series (which is still in progress).
I started learning about MIDI, and microcontrollers such as z80 or 6502. Learning concepts like FIFO buffers, stack memory, assembly language and assemblers, segment registers, VGA, UART, etc… The list went on and on.
Fast forward to today, I am still actively working on completing my final computer. It is going slowly because I enjoy diving deep into circuits and trying out things just for fun. As I learn I add a module here or there to my computer and then continue tinkering.
I am probably working 10 components at any given time. The rest of my posts will be about already completed work and perhaps a few things I am working on currently.