Show threadA Reptile Dysfunction 17h ago

Anyway, I have the designs and parts brought up to make one more acrylic board of the ALU, and after bringing up the other adders I'll be able to make another acrylic board. That leaves just the shifter circuits to be designed, fabricated, brought up and then placed on board number 5 to complete the ALU. When it rains, it pours.

#MiniDragon

Show threadA Reptile Dysfunction 17h ago

Actually got to it and have the first half of the 16-bit adder laid out completely. I still need to dremel a chase on the top for some bus cables before connecting it, but this is the whole thing wired up properly! Tomorrow I'll do the dremeling and then wire it in and then re-test everything with the permanent setup.

#MiniDragon

A Reptile Dysfunction 20h ago

Procrastinated on actually putting together a MiniDragon acrylic board by updating the layout KiCad file to include the upcoming adder circuit. Neat, the documentation is now more up-to-date than the actual CPU.

https://github.com/dragonMinded/minidragon

#MiniDragon

GitHub - DragonMinded/minidragon: Hardware and software files for the MiniDragon CPU.

Hardware and software files for the MiniDragon CPU. - DragonMinded/minidragon

GitHub
A Reptile Dysfunction 1d ago

Tonight, instead of doing another bring-up stream, I focused on a tedious but important task on the MiniDragon: identifying and labeling the MSB/LSB on each bus connector. And by that, I mean the most significant bit, and least significant bit. Most of the components are bit-order agnostic. As long as you output the same order you input, they'll work. But, now that everything is piped together, there needs to be an agreed-upon bit order! So, I did that!

I do have some old physical layout documentation that dictated my conventions at the time, and I've verified those are upheld. But, the labels are way easier to read and see.

#MiniDragon

Show threadA Reptile Dysfunction 2d ago

Alright. I excitedly filmed a demonstration of the adder circuit integrated with the ALU and working properly. Please pardon my math mistake partially through where I got super confused about 15+5 coming in at 4. I explain in the video description what's going on there. Please check it out, this is about 5 years of work on and off to get here :3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHq58udeiqo

#MiniDragon

MiniDragon ALU Adder Circuit Integration

YouTube
A Reptile Dysfunction 2d ago

dfghdoihgdoifghdifogh the ALU is WORKING.

#MiniDragon

A Reptile Dysfunction 5d ago

Brought up two more 2-bit adder boards tonight on stream. After testing them individually I tied them to the existing two for shiggles. Behold, a 8.5" by 7" stack of boards that adds two 8 bit numbers with carry in and carry out. I got 4 more to bring up at some other point to have a functioning 16 bit adder, which I need in order to do indirect addressing and manipulate the instruction pointer and stack pointers (relative jumps, moving the stack pointer forward or reverse by an immediate or the A register, etc) and have arbitrary access to all 64K of memory.

#MiniDragon

A Reptile Dysfunction 6d ago

tonight's meditative assembly was a bunch of distributor boards that i need for future panel layouts. the only components on any of these that aren't just pin headers are a bunch of capacitors on the power distributor boards. still, they make wiring boards to each other much easier and give things a bit of polish.

#MiniDragon

Emily HareApr 16
I recently made a tiny collection of dragons - so i'm trying out doing a print of them collected together. #dragons #dragonart #minidragon #watercolour #painting #prints get yours here: buff.ly/rUmKeem
Bluesky

Bluesky Social
Show threadA Reptile Dysfunction Apr 8

And then there were 14!

#MiniDragon

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A Reptile Dysfunction 5d ago

Brought up two more 2-bit adder boards tonight on stream. After testing them individually I tied them to the existing two for shiggles. Behold, a 8.5" by 7" stack of boards that adds two 8 bit numbers with carry in and carry out. I got 4 more to bring up at some other point to have a functioning 16 bit adder, which I need in order to do indirect addressing and manipulate the instruction pointer and stack pointers (relative jumps, moving the stack pointer forward or reverse by an immediate or the A register, etc) and have arbitrary access to all 64K of memory.

#MiniDragon