Rev. 2.0 boards and what’s next 4

Rev. 2.0 boards and what's next
This is how a box full of printed circuit boards looks like. That’s 30 boards total – memory card and 5 CPU cards, each in 5 copies nicely sealed in plastic. They have been sitting in my drawer since last Summer. In the meantime I have undergone a little surgery, moved to a new house, ...

BYTEC has a new home

BYTEC has a new home
BYTEC/16 finally has a professionally looking rack enclosure. It is the same enclosure which I bought on eBay and described in this post almost 5 years ago. Yes, five years ago, when my homebrew computer was mostly designed but still only half built. Now it has a new home, seems to be much happier, and ...

Works like a charm 8

As announced last time, I powered up the CPU. In all honesty, I was expecting to see a blank screen and was prepared to spend some quality debugging time in front of a scope and logic analyzer, but was positively surprised to see that the CPU worked on the very first attempt. I even let ...

CPU assembly completed

CPU assembly completed
This is what an assembled stack of seven CPU boards looks like. I was able to complete the soldering work recently, and now have a complete CPU and a bunch of peripherals on printed circuit boards. Farewell, old wire-wrapped CPU prototype! The new CPU is way more robust than the delicate wire mesh. It is ...

Got CPU boards

Got CPU boards
Time to break out the soldering iron again! CPU boards arrived in mail a few days back. That’s seven euro-sized boards, each one individually sealed in plastic, with green solder mask (anything else would mean extra manufacturing cost) and without silk screen layer (again, just to save a few bucks). At current prices of PCB ...

CPU boards 2

CPU boards
I finally managed to complete the PCB design for the CPU core. New schematics and Eagle files are available for download here. It was not an easy task and it took few months of work in short weekend bursts. The finished CPU layout consists of seven euro-boards (100x160mm), all manually routed, with 16 mils track ...