Remoticon 2021 // Jeroen Domburg [Sprite_tm] Hacks the Buddah Flower

Nobody likes opening up a hacking target and finding a black epoxy blob inside, but all hope is not lost. At least not if you've got the dedication and skills of [Jeroen Domburg] alias [Sprite_tm].

It all started when [Big Clive] ordered a chintzy Chinese musical meditation flower and found a black blob. But tantalizingly, the shiny plastic mess also included a 2 MB flash EEPROM. The questions then is: can one replace the contents with your own music? Spoiler: yes, you can! [Sprite_tm] and a team of Buddha Chip Hackers distributed across the globe got to work. (Slides here.)

[Jeroen] started off with binwalk and gets, well, not much. The data that [Big Clive] dumped had high enough entropy that it looks either random or encrypted, with the exception of a couple tiny sections. Taking a look at the data, there was some structure, though. [Jeroen] smelled shitty encryption. Now in principle, there are millions of bad encryption methods out there for every good one. But in practice, naive cryptographers tend to gravitate to a handful of bad patterns.

Bad pattern number one is XOR. Used correctly, XORing can be a force for good, but if you XOR your key with zeros, naturally, you get the key back as your ciphertext. And this data had a lot of zeros in it. That means that there were many long strings that started out the same, but they seemed to go on forever, as if they were pseudo-random. Bad crypto pattern number two is using a linear-feedback shift register for your pseudo-random numbers, because the parameter space is small enough that [Sprite_tm] could just brute-force it. At the end, he points out their third mistake -- making the encryption so fun to hack on that it kept him motivated!

Decrypted, the EEPROM data was a filesystem. And the machine language turned out to be for an 8051, but there was still the issue of the code resident on the microcontroller's ROM. So [Sprite_tm] bought one of these flowers, and started probing around the black blob itself. He wrote a dumper program that output the internal ROM's contents over SPI. Ghidra did some good disassembling, and that let him figure out how the memory was laid out, and how the flow worked. He also discovered a "secret" ROM area in the chip's flash, which he got by trying some random functions and looking for side effects. The first hit turned out to be a memcpy. Sweet.

[Neil555]'s Rosetta StoneMeanwhile, the Internet was still working on this device, and [Neil555] bought a flower too. But this one had a chip, rather than a blob, and IDing this part lead them to an SDK, and that has an audio suite that uses a derivative of WMA audio encoding. And that was enough to get music loaded into the flower. (Cue a short rick-rolling.) Victory!

Well, victory if all you wanted to do was hack your music onto the chip. As a last final fillip, [Sprite_tm] mashed the reverse-engineered schematic of the Buddha Flower together with [Thomas Flummer]'s very nice DIY Remoticon badge, and uploaded our very own intro theme music into the device on a badge. Bonus points? He added LEDs that blinked out the LSFR that were responsible for the "encryption". Sick burn!

Editor's Note: This is the last of the Remoticon 2 videos we've got. Thanks to all who gave presentations, to all who attended and participated in the lively Discord back channel, and to all you out there who keep the hacking flame alive. We couldn't do it without you, and we look forward to a return to "normal" Supercon sometime soon.

#cons #hackadaycolumns #reverseengineering #2021hackadayremoticon #8051 #badgehacking #hacking #rickroll #sprite_tm

Remoticon 2021 // Rob Weinstein Builds an HP-35 from the Patent Up

Fifty years ago, Hewlett-Packard introduced the first handheld scientific calculator, the HP-35. It was quite the engineering feat, since equivalent machines of the day were bulky desktop affairs, if not rack-mounted. [Rob Weinstein] has long been a fan of HP calculators, and used an HP-41C for many years until it wore out. Since then he gradually developed a curiosity about these old calculators and what made them tick. The more he read, the more engrossed he became. [Rob] eventually decided to embark on a three year long reverse-engineer journey that culminated a recreation of the original design on a protoboard that operates exactly like the original from 1972 (although not quite pocket-sized). In this presentation he walks us through the history of the calculator design and his efforts in understanding and eventually replicating it using modern FPGAs.

The HP patent ( US Patent 4,001,569 ) contains an extremely detailed explanation of the calculator in nearly every aspect. There are many novel concepts in the design, and [Rob] delves into two of them in his presentation. Early LED devices were a drain on batteries, and HP engineers came up with a clever solution. In a complex orchestra of multiplexed switches, they steered current through inductors and LED segments, storing energy temporarily and eliminating the need for inefficient dropping resistors. But even more complicated is the serial processor architecture of the calculator. The first microprocessors were not available when HP started this design, so the entire processor was done at the gate level. Everything operates on 56-bit registers which are constantly circulating around in circular shift registers. [Rob] has really done his homework here, carefully studying each section of the design in great depth, drawing upon old documents and books when available, and making his own material when not. For example, in the course of figuring everything out, [Rob] prepared 338 pages of timing charts in addition to those in the patent.

LED Driver Timing Chart

One section called the "Micro-Programmed Controller" is presented as just a black-box in the patent. This is the heart of the systems, and is essential to the calculator's operation. However, all the other parts that talk to the controller were so well-described in the patent that [Rob] was able to back out the details. The controller, and all sections of the calculator, was implemented in Verilog, and tested on an instrumented workbench he built to test each module.

Once everything was working in the simulations, [Rob] set out to build a working model. TInyFPGA models were used, one for each custom chip. A few understandable departures were made from the original design. An 18650 lithium ion cell powers the board, kept topped off by a modern battery charging controller. The board is larger than the original, and yes, he's using the Hackaday-obligatory 555 chip in the power-on circuit. In this short demonstration video, you can see the final prototype being put through its paces side by side with an original HP-35, working through examples from the owner's manual.

This is an incredibly researched and thoroughly documented project. [Rob] has made the design open source and is sharing it on the project's GitLab repository. [Rob]'s slides for Remoticon are not only a great overview of the project, but have some good references included. Its clear he has a real passion for these old calculators and has done a fantastic job exploring the HP-35. But even after three years, there's more to come. He's thinking about making a PCB version, and a discrete implementation using individual logic gates may be in the works.

We wrote about the history of the HP-35 before. And if you like hacking into these old calculators, check out our writeup of a similar dive into the Sinclair scientific calculator.

#cons #retrocomputing #reverseengineering #2021hackadayremoticon #calculator #fpga #hewlettpackard #hp35 #retrocalculator #reverseengineer #verilog

Remoticon 2021 // Arsenjis Tears Apart Your Laptop

Hackaday's own [Arsenijs Picugins] has been rather busy hacking old laptops apart and learning what can and cannot be easily reused, and presents for the 2021 Hackaday Remoticon, a heavily meme-loaded presentation with some very practical advice.

Full HD, IPS LCD display with touch support, reused with the help of a dedicated driver board

What parts inside a dead laptop are worth keeping? Aside from removable items like RAM stick and hard drives, the most obvious first target is the LCD panel. These are surprisingly easy to use, with driver boards available on the usual marketplaces, so long as you make sure to check the exact model number of your panel is supported.

Many components inside laptops are actually USB devices, things like touch screen controllers, webcams and the like are usually separate modules, which simply take power and USB. This makes sense, since laptops already have a fair amount of external USB connectivity, why not use it internally too? Other items are a bit trickier: trackpads seem to be either PS/2 or I2C and need a bit more hardware support. Digital microphones mostly talk I2S, which means some microcontroller coding.

Some items need a little more care, however, so maybe avoid older Dell batteries, with their 'spicy pillow' tendencies. As [Arsenijs] says, take them when they are ripe for the picking, but not too ripe. Batteries need a little care and feeding, make sure you've got some cell protection, if you pull raw cells! Charging electronics are always on the motherboard, so that's something you'll need to arrange yourself if you take a battery module, but it isn't difficult, so long as you can find your way around SMBus protocol.

These batteries are too ripe. Leave them alone.

Older laptops were much more modular and some even designed for upgrade or modification, and this miniaturization-driven trend of shrinking everything — where a laptop now needs to be thin enough to shave with — is causing some manufacturers to move in a much more proprietary direction regarding hardware design.

This progression conflicts with our concerns of privacy, repairability and waste elimination, resulting in closed boxes filled with unrepairable, non-reusable black boxes. We think it's time to take back some of the hardware, so three cheers to those taking upon themselves the task to reverse engineer and publish reusability information, and long may it be possible to continue.

#cons #hackadaycolumns #techhacks #2021hackadayremoticon #ewasterecycling #laptop #lcddisplay #reuse

Remoticon 2021 // Vaibhav Chhabra and the M19 Collective Make One Million Faceshields

[Vaibhav Chhabra], the co-founder of Maker's Asylum hackerspace in Mumbai, India, starts his Remoticon talk by telling a short story about how the hackerspace rose to its current status. Born out of frustration with a collapsed office ceiling, having gone through eight years of moving and reorganizations, it accumulated a loyal participant base - not unusual with hackerspaces that are managed well. This setting provided a perfect breeding ground for the M19 effort when COVID-19 reached India, mixing "what can we do" and "what should we do" inquiries into a perfect storm and starting the 49 day work session that swiftly outgrew the hackerspace, both physically and organizationally.

When the very first two weeks of the Infinite Two Week Quarantine Of 2020 were announced in India, a group of people decided to wait it out at the hackerspace instead of confining themselves to their homes. As various aspects of our society started crashing after the direct impact of COVID-19, news came through - that of a personal protective equipment shortage, especially important for frontline workers. Countries generally were not prepared when it came to PPE, and India was no different. Thus, folks in Maker's Asylum stepped up, finding themselves in a perfect position to manufacture protective equipment when nobody else was prepared to help.

We've seen collective projects like these over the years - this one is magnificent in its thoughtfulness at scale. All of that is here for us to learn from - for instance, nuances of manufacturability optimisations in context of diverse variety of hackerspace infrastructure. An often-forgotten requirement for any project wishing to be successful is expanded upon - keeping the end users, healthcare specialists, in a tight iterative design loop. The sheer amount of this effort, coupled with media coverage, didn't go unnoticed by other hackerspaces, which is where the challenge of sharing knowledge rose up, and was swiftly dealt with. End result? One million faceshields produced across India's hackerspaces and other lasercutter-equipped places, in only a bit longer than a month and a half's time.

After the demand for face shields started to finally get fulfilled, the new capabilities and strengths of the hackerspace consortium were waiting for the next goal to be unlocked - at least, those that didn't need to be diverted to quality assurance and keeping the effort running. The experiences and frameworks developed during are now a vital part of a research case study and QA/QC principle formation effort, both led and funded by University of Cambridge. In turn, the maker resources available were then directed towards designing and manufacturing oxygen concentrators, as well as repairing the ones that were just waiting to be put into working order.

If you were ever looking for a tale of a myriad hackerspaces collaborating on a social project, this is it - and there's plenty to learn for anyone wishing to inspire other hackers to conquer large social problems. This talk covers about every part of the process that you would like to learn from, wrapped in an exciting story you could make a documentary on. The effort lives on, and we will certainly see its principles in action whenever it is that the next storm hits us.

#cons #hackadaycolumns #hackerspaces #medicalhacks #2021hackadayremoticon #covid #covid19 #india #m19collective #makersasylum #remoticon

Remoticon 2021 // Jay Bowles Dips Into The Plasmaverse

Every hacker out there is familiar with the zaps and sizzles of the Tesla coil, or the crash and thunder of lighting strikes on our hallowed Earth. These phenomena all involve the physics of plasma, a subject near and dear to [Jay Bowles's] heart. Thus, he graced Remoticon 2021 with a enlightening talk taking us on a Dip Into The Plasmaverse.

[Jay]'s passion for the topic is obvious, having fallen in love with high voltage physics as a teenager. He appreciated how tangible the science was, whether it's the glow of neon lighting or the heating magic of the common microwave. His talk covers the experiments and science that he's studied over the past 17 years and in the course of running his Plasma Channel YouTube channel.

Physics!

The talk serves as a great dive into the world of HV experimentation, with [Jay] featuring three exotic applications of high voltage science.

The first demonstration is of human electrostatic levitation. This requires a very high static voltage of -60,000 V applied to the body via a Cockroft-Walton voltage multiplier, while [Jay] is isolated from the ground on a stool. [Jay] reminds the audience that high voltage itself is not by itself lethal to the body, highlighting the role current has to play. A bottom plate is then used, set at ground potential to enable the effect.

With the voltage applied, a lightweight foil "boat" will levitate above the plate and below [Jay]'s hand. It's a quasistable system, and a difficult thing to maintain, but the experiment works and the aluminium foil floats in the air. [Jay] then goes through the science behind it all, discussing the charge relationships and the other physical effects at play. The detail is key, which explains not just how the foil floats, but how it remains in place without shooting off in one direction.

It only gets more exotic, with [Jay] repurposing the voltage multiplier and stool to bend a flame electrostatically. This is possible as fire contains many positive and negative ions which can be influenced by electric fields. It's an effect that [Jay] discovered by accident, having left a burning candle near a high-voltage multiplier, and noticed the flame bending towards the high voltage source.

High voltages can literally split a flame in two.

With his body charged to high voltage once more, [Jay] is able to "pull" the flame towards his left or right hand, with the demo proving difficult as he twice pulled the flame entirely off the wick, extinguishing the candle. It's a dangerous experiment in some ways too, as it involves literally attracting fire towards the body. In more controlled conditions, [Jay] has been able to achieve some impressive feats with this trick, bending and tugging large flames to his will, even "splitting" a candle flame in two directions.

The last demonstration involves a device called an atmospheric corona motor. Rather than the "high" current used by magnetic motors, it relies on high voltage instead, running at extremely low currents. The design relies on electrostatic charges to turn a rotor rather than electromagnetic fields, and [Jay] explains how it all works and compares it to the operation of a traditional gravity-driven waterwheel. He also points out how the motor can be driven by static electricity extracted from the atmosphere itself, with the help of a balloon or drone to carry a wire high into the air.

Overall, the talk serves as a wonderful dip into the plasmaverse, just as the title promises. [Jay]'s demonstrations and explanations are a great primer to get any hacker thinking about the possibilities of working with high voltage plasma science. All that's left is to get experimenting on your own!

#cons #hackadaycolumns #science #2021hackadayremoticon #electricity #hackaday #highvoltage #hv #physics #plasma #plasmaphysics #remoticon #talk #talks

Remoticon 2021 // Joey Castillo Teaches Old LCDs New Tricks

Segmented liquid crystal displays are considered quite an old and archaic display technology these days. They're perhaps most familiar to us from their use in calculators and watches, where they still find regular application. [Joey Castillo] decided that he could get more out of these displays with a little tinkering, and rocked up to Remoticon 2021 to share his findings.

[Joey's] talk is a great way to learn the skills needed to reverse engineer a typical segment LCD.[Joey] got his start hacking on these displays via his Sensor Watch project - a board swap for the venerable Casio F-91W wristwatch, with the project now available on CrowdSupply. It kits out the 33-year-old watch design with a modern, low-power ARM Cortex M0+ microcontroller running at 32 MHz that completely revolutionizes what the watch can do. Most importantly, however, it repurposes the watches original segmented monochrome LCD.

Segment LCDs are usually small monochrome devices made out of glass, that have the benefit of using very little power in their operation. They come with a fixed layout, which cannot be changed - so they're often designed specifically for a given purpose. A calculator will have segments laid out to display numbers, often in the usual 7-segment fashion, while a watch may add dedicated segments for displaying things like "AM," "PM," or "ALARM."

Their purpose-built nature means they're often very thin and compact with useful layouts that are attractive and fitting for their given applications. Compared to general purpose LCDs, like the popular HD44780 character LCDs, they often have much cleaner aesthetics and a sleeker design as they're meant to be consumer-facing, rather than used in any one of a million different industrial applications.

[Joey's] talk starts off with a primer on how segment LCDs work, initially comparing them to 7-segment LEDs that so many of us are familiar with. However, LCDs are a little different in their operation, with segments darkening when a voltage differential exists, and are driven with AC signals rather than DC. [Joey] explains how to drive LCD segments in this manner, providing a CircuitPython example that demonstrates how its done.

Multiplexing is also described in detail, a technique used in many segment LCDs to allow them to be driven with less IO pins. Scoping out the LCD pins on a standard Casio F-91W wristwatch shows how the technique works, and it's easy to follow along seeing the signals displayed clearly on an oscilloscope. [Joey] also explains that generating all the signals needed is easy if you just go out and purchase a microcontroller with an integrated segment LCD controller, like the Microchip SAM L22.

As a primary example of what can be achieved when hacking segment LCDs, [Joey] shows how he repurposed the display from the Casio Databank DB-36. The LCD has 55 connections and tons of segments, and is hooked up with zebra strips - a rather delicate method of connecting a segment LCD. Using some sticky tape, he blocks out a pin going to the LCD, reassembles the watch, and looks for which segments don't work anymore. This technique allows the pinout of the display to be quickly mapped out.

Obviously, though, if you're reverse-engineering a display, you're limited to using the segments as laid out by the original designers. As [Joey] happily explains, though, you can actually get your own custom segment LCDs made without too much bother! He's already done it himself, creating a dupe to match the Casio F-91W in a Feather-compatible form factor to ease development of the Sensor Watch board. There is a quantity requirement, but you can end up spending less than $1 per unit on big orders.

While segment LCDs are old-school and basic, they're still a great technology for any low-power project that needs to display some data. After all, just think about how long the average digital wrist watch can last on a single coin-cell battery! [Joey]'s talk is a great primer if you're interested in taking advantage of these displays, whether in existing hardware or by getting your own made from scratch!

#cons #hackadaycolumns #2021hackadayremoticon #7segment #casio #casiof91w #casiowatch #lcd #remoticon #segmentlcd #sensorwatch

Remoticon 2021 // Matt Venn Helps You Make ASICS

What would you make if you were given about ten square millimeters of space on a silicon wafer on a 130 nm process? That's the exact question that the Open MPW program asks, and that [Matt Venn] has stepped up to answer. [Matt] came to Remoticon in 2020 to talk about his journey from nothing to his own ASIC, and he came back in 2021 to talk about what has happened in a year.

[maxiborga] has been making beautiful renders of his and others' chip designsWe expected great designs, but the variety of exciting and wonderful designs that have been submitted we think exceeded our expectations. [Matt] goes through quite a few of them, such as an analog neuron, a RISC-V Arduino-compatible microprocessor, and a satellite transceiver. Perhaps an unexpected side effect has been the artwork. Since the designs are not under an NDA, anyone can take the design and transform it into something gorgeous.

Of course, all of this hardware design isn't possible without an open toolchain. There is an SRAM generator known as OpenRAM that can generate RAM blocks for your design. Coriolis2 is an RTL to GDS tool that can do placement and routing in VLSI. Finally, FlexCell is a cell library that tries to provide standard functions in a flexible, customizable way that cuts down on the complexity of the layout. There are GitHub actions that can run tests and simulations on PRs to keep the chip's HDL in a good state.

However, it's not all roses, and there was an error on the first run (MPW1). Hold time violations were not detected, and the clock tree wasn't correct. This means that the GPIO cannot be set up, so the designs in the middle could be working, but without the GPIO, it is tricky to determine. With a regular chip, that would be the end, but since [Matt] has access to both the layout and the design, he can identify the problem and come up with a plan. He's planning on overriding the IO setup shift register with an auxiliary microcontroller. (Ed Note: [tnt] has been making some serious progress lately, summarized in this video.)

It is incredible to see what has come from the project so far, and we're looking forward to future runs. If this convinces you that you need to get your own ASIC made, you should check out [Matt]'s "Zero to ASIC" course.

#cons #hackadaycolumns #hardware #2021hackadayremoticon #asic #fab

Remoticon 2021 // Sergiy Nesterenko Keeps Hardware Running Through Lightning and Cosmic Rays

Getting to space is hard enough. You have to go up a few hundred miles, then go sideways really fast to enter orbit. But getting something into space is one thing: keeping a delicate instrument working as it travels there is quite another. In his talk at Remoticon 2021, [Sergiy Nesterenko], former Radiation Effects Engineer at SpaceX, walks us through all the things that can destroy your sensitive electronics on the way up.

The trouble already starts way before liftoff. Due to an accident of geography, several launch sites are located in areas prone to severe thunderstorms: not the ideal location to put a 300-foot long metal tube upright and leave it standing for a day. Other hazards near the launch pad include wayward wildlife and salty spray from the ocean.

Those dangers are gone once you're in space, but then suddenly heat becomes a problem: if your spacecraft is sitting in full sunlight, it will quickly heat up to 135 °C, while the parts in the shade cool off to -150 °C. A simple solution is to spin your craft along its axis to ensure an even heat load on all sides, similar to the way you rotate sausages on your barbecue.

But one of the most challenging problems facing electronics in space is radiation. [Sergiy] explains in detail the various types of radiation that a spacecraft might encounter: charged particles in the Van Allen belts, cosmic rays once you get away from Low Earth orbit, and a variety of ionized junk ejected from the Sun every now and then. The easiest way to reduce the radiation load on your electronics is simply to stay near Earth and take cover within its magnetic field.

For interplanetary spacecraft there's no escaping the onslaught, and the only to survive is to make your electronics "rad-hard". Shielding is generally not an option because of weight constraints, so engineers make use of components that have been tested in radiation chambers to ensure they will not suddenly short-circuit. Adding redundant circuits as well as self-monitoring features like watchdog timers also helps to make flight computers more robust.

[Sergiy]'s talk is full of interesting anecdotes that will delight the inner astronaut in all of us. Ever imagined a bat trying to hitch a ride on a Space Shuttle? As it turns out, one aspiring space bat did just that. And while designing space-qualified electronics is not something most of us do every day, [Sergiy]'s experiences provide plenty of tips for more down-to-earth problems. After all, salt and moisture will eat away cables on your bicycle just as they do on a moon rocket.

Be sure to also check out the links embedded in the talk's slides for lots of great background information.

#cons #hackadaycolumns #space #2021hackadayremoticon #ionizingradiation #radiationhardening

Remoticon 2021 // Colin O’Flynn Zaps Chips (And They Talk)

One of the many fascinating fields that's covered by Hackaday's remit lies in the world of hardware security, working with physical electronic hardware to reveal inner secrets concealed in its firmware. Colin O'Flynn is the originator of the ChipWhisperer open-source analysis and fault injection board, and he is a master of the art of glitching chips. We were lucky enough to be able to welcome him to speak at last year's Remoticon on-line conference, and now you can watch the video of his talk below the break. If you need to learn how to break RSA encryption with something like a disposable camera flash, this is the talk for you.

This talk is an introduction to signal sniffing and fault injection techniques. It's well-presented and not presented as some unattainable wizardry, and as his power analysis demo shows a clearly different trace on the correct first letter of a password attack the viewer is left with an understanding of what's going on rather than hoping for inspiration in a stream of the incomprehensible. The learning potential of being in full control of both instrument and target is evident, and continues as the talk moves onto fault injection with an introduction to power supply glitching as a technique to influence code execution.

Schematic of an EM injector built from a camera flash.

His final trick is to take a look at glitching by EM injection using an electromagnetic pulse. Here he takes us into a much lower-tech direction, as while he shows us his ChipShouter product the main thrust of the segment comes in demonstrating a much more rudimentary but cheaper EM injector built from the parts of a disposable camera flash. From an electronic design perspective the interesting part comes in the probe and its trigger, an IGBT is used to pulse a small coil mounted on an SMA plug. Here the target is a Raspberry Pi running repeated RSA signing test code, and even the simpler EM injector is able to crash it and extract the keys. He wraps up with a few smaller examples of the same technique on microcontrollers, and even mentions that the same technique can yield results from such rudimentary tools as an electrostatic gas lighter.

Whether this talk inspires you to break out the piezo lighers, cobble together a simple glitching rig yourself, to invest in a ChipWhisper, or none of the above, Colin's talk sheds some light on another of our community's Dark Arts.

#cons #hackadaycolumns #hardware #securityhacks #2021hackadayremoticon #chipshouter #chipwhisperer #eminjection #faultinjection #poweranalysis

Remoticon 2021 // Voja Antonic Makes You a Digital Designer

[Voja Antonic] has been building digital computers since before many of us were born. He designed with the Z80 when it was new , and has decades of freelance embedded experience, so when he takes the time to present a talk for us, it's worth paying attention.

For his Remoticon 2022 presentation, he will attempt to teach us how to become a hardware expert in under forty minutes. Well, mostly the digital stuff, but that's enough for one session if you ask us. [Voja] takes us from the very basics of logic gates, through combinatorial circuits, sequential circuits, finally culminating in the description of a general-purpose microprocessor.

A 4-bit ripple-carry adder with additional CPU flag outputs

As he demonstrates, complex digital electronics systems really are just built up in a series of steps of increasing complexity. starting with individual active elements (transistors operating as switches) forming logic elements capable of performing simple operations.

From there, higher level functions such as adders can be formed, and from those an ALU and so on. Conceptually, memory elements can be formed from logic gates, but it's not the most efficient way to do it, and those tend to be made with a smaller and faster circuit. But anyway, that model is fine for descriptive purposes.

Once you have combinatorial logic circuits and memory elements, you have all you need to make the necessary decoders, sequencers and memory circuits to build processors and other kinds of higher complexity circuits.

Obviously forty minutes isn't anywhere nearly enough time time to learn all of the intricacies of building a real microprocessor like the pesky details of interfacing with it and programming it, but for getting up the learning curve from just a knowledge of binary numbers to an understanding of how a CPU is built, it's a pretty good starting point.

Now, If you can only tear your eyes away from his slick game-of-life wall mounted LED display, you might pick up a thing or two.

#cons #hackadaycolumns #microcontrollers #2021hackadayremoticon #digitalelectronics #logic #vojaantonic