New Project: 7400 Logic Calculator

My newest project is a calculator using 7400-series logic chips. There are a lot of really neat computers built using these parts, and I would like to try building a relatively small one that fits into a calculator. My idea is to keep the design as minimal as possible, since even a simple computer of this type could get pretty big quickly. There are a few things I have been thinking of for a long time that should help me save space.

A few years ago, I got interested in building one of these computers using lookup tables on a flash or EEPROM chip to implement a simple ALU and got as far as putting a 4x4 bit look up on table on an EEPROM. Eventually, I gave up the idea since at least one other person had built essentially the same thing that I wanted to build, and I didn't want to totally reinvent the wheel. Recently, I got interested in the idea again when I saw Ben Eater's excellent series on building an 8-bit breadboard computer. It uses an EEPROM for microcode, which is what I had considered for other projects. Another neat project I looked at is the Gigatron, which is a different RISC-type design that I don't think uses microcode. So far, I have been able to get a fairly simple version of what I want to build going in the Atanua simulator:

After I got this going, I already started looking for ways to make the circuit smaller and fit into a calculator sized case. First, I have four registers, which would make programming a lot more convenient, but I would leave out to save space. Also, I have two microcode ROMs, like in Ben Eater's design, although I could survive with just one if I latch out some of the control codes from the program ROM.

Summer Hackathon

Over the past year, I have not had as much time as I would have liked to devote to my electronics projects because I have been so busy with school. Hopefully I will be able to catch up this summer. My goal is to finish some projects I have already started on and start on some others I have been planning for a long time.

Here is a list of what I will be working on. Even though I probably won't have time to finish them all, these are my goals for the summer.

EEPROM Computer	Progress:	40%
As part of another project, I got interested in using an EEPROM lookup table to do four bit additions and ended up with this test setup. A 32KB EEPROM can hold 64 tables, which is enough to implement all the op codes for a full CPU. Hopefully this will greatly reduce the amount of logic involved. All that should be needed are some counters, buffers, and a multiplexer. So far I have finished most of a simulation in Atanua and started on a symbolic assembler. After I finish the assembler and have the simulation running, I will move everything to perfboard and program the op codes and source code into real EEPROMs.

8-bit Homebrew Computer	Progress:	0%
This project is something I have been thinking about for a long time. I won't say exactly how I plan to do it yet but looking on the internet I haven't found anything similar. It won't be possible to simulate this project in Atanua, so I plan to build it directly on a breadboard. The same assembler from the EEPROM Computer should be able to be changed to work for this also. I'm not sure yet whether it will be worth it to make a PC simulator for this project.

Brainfuck Micrcontroller	Progress:	50%
After I finished the simulation for this project, I did not do much more work on it. The simulated version is four bits and will have to be expanded to eight in the final hardware. The software for the project is very simple, as all it does is convert Brainfuck commands into simple op codes.

Juggalo Robot	Progress:	70%
My brother and I started work on converting a remote control car into a robot. It will have a baby doll on top with moving arms and a rotating head. He decided to paint the doll's face and make the robot juggalo themed. He got motor drivers working with an Arduino for servos in the arms and a stepper for the head. My work so far has been to reroute motor control signals on the car from the motors to a microcontroller. That way another microcontroller in the remote control can send motor control signals over the radio, which the microcontroller in the car will intercept and interpret. Then it can activate the motors, servos, or stepper according to the signal sent by the remote. The hardware is mostly finished. All that's left is the software, which should be pretty simple.

ESP8266	Progress:	0%
Last year we had a fun night doing projects with some SparkCores at our hackerspace and I decided to get a hold of an ESP8266. At $4 it was much cheaper than a SparkCore, even if it is not as easy to program. Unfortunately, I have not had time to even hook it up and try anything with it. One of my plans is to install it in a calculator for an idea I have been thinking about for a long time. One of the challenges will be getting it to connect correctly to WiFi at my university or local cafes. Another idea is to use it to program MSP430s or EEPROMs from my Chromebook, since it can't program them directly over USB.

Wireless Breadboard	Progress:	0%
This is a project I put a lot of thought into before I found out that it has already been done. My plan is to use IO expanders to control every row of a breadboard with a microcontroller. For rows that should be connected wirelessly, the microcontroller will read and relay signals to the appropriate row. This will be comparatively slow because the microcontroller will be bitbanging both the input and output of the IO expanders. Another project I saw used an FPGA, which would be much faster, but using IO expanders will hopefully be an acceptable solution, even if it is much slower. All the connections between rows will be set on the PC, which is hopefully more convenient than plugging in wires. The main advantage will be monitoring the rows and displaying data in an easy to read way on the PC. This should really speed up debugging. Also, output signals can be controlled from the PC, so programming EEPROMs or other chips should be easy.

ATF1508 CPLD	Progress:	5%
For my next 6502 project I want to use a CPLD for the address decoding. The ATF1508 is one of the few ones left in production that runs at 5 volts. It can be programmed over JTAG, so I started soldering a programmer that will use an MPS430. The chip comes in PLCC. so soldering the adapter will be a little inconvenient. My plan is to add LEDs and dip switches so I can test my designs after programming.

BASIC Interpreter	Progress:	30%
A couple of projects I would like to do eventually will need to run a BASIC interpreter. One of them is the wireless breadboard mentioned above. It would be better for new functionality, like device programming, to be done with some kind of script. That way, new scripts can be transfered to the chip at run time, instead of having to reflash the chip every time.

LCD Programming	Progress:	0%
Some of the upcoming projects will need an output of some kind. A four inch LCD should work well for the ones that a 20x4 character LCD isn't enough for. Hopefully I can get one kind of LCD going that will work for several of the projects. Another option is a 5.5 inch LCD I got a few years ago. It is much larger but requires -27 volts for contrast. This is not easy to generate, but if I can get it going, I will hopefully be able to buy several more pretty cheaply. It would work well with homebrew projects if I can get it working without a microcontroller. The STM32F429 board I have been working with also has an LCD that I would like to get going.

Improved 6502 Trainer	Progress:	20%
The 6502 Virtual Trainer was nearly finished when I stopped working on it months ago. It works really well, except that the max speed is just under 0.02 MHz. Now that I have my STM32 board running, I hope to port the code for the project from the MSP430. It ran the BCD multiply routine from the microcontroller comparison about 15 times faster, although that's probably not a good indicator of how much faster it would be for this project. There are a few changes to how UART works that might speed things up also. Another speedup will come from driving the GPIOs directly, instead of through IO expanders. Hopefully all of this together will give me the 50x speedup I need to hit 1MHz. At first I intend to make a board that will plug into the STM32 board directly and possibly use a UART cable for communication. When I figure out how to design PCBs I will make a standalone board with an STM32F429 and an FT232.

Improved RPN Calculator	Progress:	40%
For one of my friends I would like to remake my original RPN Scientific Calculator. This time I will use an LPC1114, which will allow me to copy numbers to the chip's memory before calculating. This should greatly increase calculation time because the external memory won't have to be accessed during any calculations. This will also make the firmware smaller. It should easily fit into the 32 KB the chip has, so two microcontrollers won't be necessary. Also, I would like to use a 23LC1024 SPI SRAM this time instead of parallel RAM. Altogether, the circuit should be very small.

Brainfuck Microcontroller

For a year or two I have been thinking about making a brainfuck computer out of 7400 series logic. Homebrew computers made out of logic chips are fairly common so my idea was to implement it as a microcontroller, with an input and output port instead of a screen or keyboard. This way I could drive LEDs, displays, shift registers, or anything else a microcontroller can. Before I made any progress on my idea, I stumbled on a neat project that is similar, The BrainFuck Machine. It uses a UART chip for input and output. Running an HD44780 or LED matrix with my project using brainfuck code should be an extra challenge.

Not long ago another member at the hackerspace I go to was talking about 7400 series logic projects and spontaneously asked me if I had ever thought about making a brainfuck computer. We had come up with the same idea independently and decided to work together. He already had quite a lot of chips including RAM and UV-erasable EPROMs to work with. His UV lamp didn't work any more so I got a replacement bulb for just a few dollars from Bulb Town. That didn't work either so I had a look inside the lamp. The ballast appeared to be sealed with some kind of gasket to the body and there doesn't seem to be any way to get inside it without breaking that. A few other chips were plain old EEPROMs that work at 5v. With some shift registers and a transistor for level shifting, it was pretty easy to program and read them with an MSP430 on a breadboard. When I finish transferring that to perfboard, I will make a post on it.

My partner and I drew up a schematic that looked reasonable and he started on a wire-wrapped board for everything. Personally, I prefer to solder boards but it will be a good chance to see how wire-wrapping works. He also knows how to make printed circuit boards with the materials at the hackerspace. Over the winter break I haven't been at home with any hardware, so I started working on a simulated version of the project with the program Atanua. It is a 7400 chip simulator that was recently released for free. A year or so ago I was really interested in using it but gave up after all of the annoying pop-ups asking to pay. In principle I would not mind paying $5-10 for something like that if it had more features that in other programs are standard:

Click to enlarge

• Cut, copy, and paste
• Selection tool
• Properties window for objects
• Rotate for objects
• Connection points for wires
• Buttons with no letters
• More 7400 chips
• SRAM chips
• Detailed screenshots

Despite the above annoyances, the simulation turned out alright in the end. To make things a little easier, I only implemented an 8 bit address space. The only RAM chip that can be simulated is a 74LS89, so the data stack is only 4 bits wide and 16 elements deep. At first I connected all the control signals for the chips to buttons so they could be manually operated. After I got that working, I started using EEPROM data to control the signals. The first version pushed the address of every [ onto a stack and jumped back to that at the corresponding ] if the current data wasn't 0. This only used a few chips and worked well but test code failed. It took me a while to realize that a loop like this that always executes at least once is equivalent to a do...while loop, not the plain while loop it is supposed to work like. The next version used a jump instruction that stores the jump address as the byte after the instruction. Getting the signal sequence right so that the jump address is not treated as an op code but is loaded into a buffer then transferred to the address buffer on the right cycle according to the data stack value was pretty tricky. Sometimes backwards jumps loaded half a cycle early, so I inserted a NOP after every forward jump. This wastes space and cycles but is acceptable for this small conceptual test. The jump sequencer could also take less cycles and some of the glue logic could be reduced, which I plan to do when we start on the full version.

In addition to the eight standard commands, it also supports # which many implementations use as a debug command to halt execution. The clock is run through a counter and XORed to produce two alternating clock signals. New EEPROM data appears on even cycles and is latched in as control signals on odd cycles so that the EEPROM output has time to settle before being latched. This probably doesn't matter in the simulation but seems like a necessary step on real hardware. Otherwise, I'm not sure how data appears on the bus and is latched in the same cycle. The control signals themselves use all 8 of the bits for convenience's sake, although they could be condensed. The data readout uses 74LS47 BCD converter chips connected to every three bits which gives an octal display.

To test the setup I wrote this short program which clears the first 6 bytes of the stack then sets the first four to 1, 2, 4, and 8 using multiplication. Then it outputs each byte in turn to the output buffer for a Larson scanner effect. The program comes to 249 bytes when run through the very simple assembler program I wrote, which is just shy of the 256 bytes available with an 8 bit address space.

[-]> [-]> [-]> [-]> [-]> [-] <<<<< + [    [       >++       >+       <<-    ]    >>    [<<+>>-]    < ] < [    .<.<.<    .>.>.> ]

Zero first six bytes Return pointer to 0 Start counter at 1 Add two for every one of counter Make a copy of counter Subtract one from counter Loop until counter==0 Point to copy of counter Copy counter back to its place New counter is next address Loop until counter overflows to 0 Set pointer to last value Output 8, 4, 2 Output 1, 2, 4 Loop forever