Relay Computer - Prototyping Board & Instruction Register

Рет қаралды 3,038

Күн бұрын

I've reached the point where I want to experiment with different designs, and I needed something with more capacity than a standard breadboard. This new prototyping board allowed me to very quickly set-up an instruction register and even add the Instruction Fetch Cycle microcode!
Chapters
0:00 Intro
0:32 New Program Counter Overview
1:21 Instruction Register and the concept of Prototyping
2:21 Design Time!
3:10 New Prototyping Board Overview
5:06 Assembly Montage!
8:29 Instruction Fetch Cycle
9:48 New Prototyping Backplane
10:20 Testing
14:17 Outro & Speed-Run fade out
Thank you for watching, and as always I welcome any feedback or ideas for future projects!
Music
Nine Lives - Unicorn Heads
Komorebi - Futuremono

Пікірлер: 48

@AJB2K3 Ай бұрын

There is something musical and pleasant to listening to those relays.

@rubenhillier770 Ай бұрын

This is starting to take shape, the prototype board is a very good idea.

@txd Ай бұрын

Aww yeah. Time to open a beer and watch this :D

@txd Ай бұрын

The production value keeps increasing :D

@dipdoting Ай бұрын

Thank you for noticing - trying to up my game with each video 😎😬

@veryberrykeri Ай бұрын

always excited to see more progress!!

@dipdoting Ай бұрын

Thank you!

@VirtuallyRetro Ай бұрын

Loving this very impressive. Really looking forward to the next update...

@dipdoting Ай бұрын

Thank you, it really is a fun build!

@strange67x Ай бұрын

Sure great idea ! 🙂 But you should add some capacitors to buffer the voltage drop over your various 5 volt lines for these bunch of relais !

@skeezixcodejedi Ай бұрын

This is really a thing of beauty :) Its really fun and addicting building up an SBC or home designed computer, but doing with relays just is so fun. And insane. But mostly fun :)

@dipdoting Ай бұрын

The process has taught me a lot in both design and low-level CPU functions - it is a bit insane and I'm always surprised when I plug in a new board and it actually works 😁

@GegoXaren Ай бұрын

This was interesting, as always. Keep up the good work!

@dipdoting Ай бұрын

Glad you enjoyed it!

@awesomecronk7183 Ай бұрын

You've inspired me to FINALLY build the relay computer I've wanted to build for years! ALSO nice intro!

@dipdoting Ай бұрын

Thank you! The intro was also a lot of fun, love doing stop-motion stuff! Glad to hear you're going to build one, let me know how it's going!

@awesomecronk7183 Ай бұрын

@@dipdoting Well it's a much more complex design that probably would be best left to TTL. The ALU alone is about 87 relays so far. It's my 5th or 6th scratch computer design and I put a lot more effort into making it capable than I did into making it small. We'll see how much I regret that later on!

@setlonnert Ай бұрын

Very interesting to follow. Long time ago I intended to write a paper (in history of technology) about the first Swedish computer BARK (you can find an article of it on Wikipedia in Swedish, but make an automatic translation to English as the English version doesn't really have content at all). It was all relays and some of the documentation could be found at the national archive. Some were still under seal (much military hush, hush). Always wondered how it worked, and now I can at least imagine how!

@dipdoting Ай бұрын

Wow! Thank you for that -- In all my research I have never read about this BARK before! 32-bits, 50 registers and 8,000 relays!!!! What a monster! I hope that's in a museum somewhere!

@charlieb.4273 Ай бұрын

Like the line in Jaws. You’re going to need a bigger backplane. I thought of this before you showed the ribbon daisy chain setup. Well done. Following with great interest. Charlie in Virginia.

@dipdoting Ай бұрын

Haha I was so close to using the line a couple of times but was worries no one would get the reference! I'm going to squeeze that into a future video...thank you for following along!

@420Ayan Ай бұрын

Thanks for sharing, I have been waiting to start my own project. Going to university now so I can finally start something like this and this is really good motivation and insight :)

@dipdoting Ай бұрын

For what it's worth, I started with a cheap set of breadboards, a few relays, LEDs , resistors, jumper wires and a battery. Oh and I guess diodes, too...I always forget about those 😬 The only thing I'd recommend is to buy good quality breadboards - they are a bit more expensive but they are well worth it!

@420Ayan Ай бұрын

@@dipdoting I have had to experience first hand the horrors of cheap breadboards, having to troubleshoot a circuit only to realize halfway through that one needs to troubleshoot the breadboard too. If there is one thing I'd happily pay a premium on it would be breadboards haha Cheers.

@bradinatorhd4500 Ай бұрын

Love the new prototype board design!

@dipdoting Ай бұрын

Thank you!

@sashimanu Ай бұрын

The sound it makes reminds me of teletypes. If your machine can run at 10 cycles per second it can load programs from a 8-bit punched tape reader, such as one included in model 33 ASR teleprinter, or a from a separate unit (much smaller than a teletype)

@dipdoting Ай бұрын

I LOVE the sound of teletypes; having one is on my bucket list. Always been fascinated with how they are mechanically synchronized and actually passed serial data so many decades ago!

@pdrg Ай бұрын

Great work. Just a query - at 14:23 on the backplane it looks as if the reservoir capacitor is doming out a little, could it be failing? May be worth checking/bearing in mind if you get errant behaviours.

@dipdoting Ай бұрын

Good eye! I'm thinking I'll need a larger capacitor...there'll be one on each backplane to split the load.

@mheermance Ай бұрын

I like your prototype board. With TTL CPUs people store the microcode in an EEPROM, but you can't do that. So it will be interesting to see how you build it out of relays. I suppose a diode ROM is possible.

@dipdoting Ай бұрын

Yes, it makes for an interesting time decoding the instructions, for example the micro-code to transfer a value between registers will take ~10 relays.

@CoruscationsOfIneptitude Ай бұрын

ya!

@faneuil1 Ай бұрын

take my damn money! I want one! (seriously)

@faneuil1 Ай бұрын

and love the logo - got merch??

@dipdoting Ай бұрын

Merch has crossed my mind 😉 I'll try to come up with something relay interesting. As for the boards themselves, I'm going to post some designs soon once I find a good site.

@mutzbunny Ай бұрын

what Wirewrap tool do you have, ive been searching for one, but couldnt find the one i need. yours look like exactly what i need

@dipdoting Ай бұрын

It's a Jameco Benchpro WWT-100, and inside the handle there's a wire stripper as well.

@jyvben1520 Ай бұрын

enclosure, active cooling ? internal or external power ? com port ?

@dipdoting Ай бұрын

Lots to think about for all of these - likely just a good old fan for cooling, internal power supply, COM port running a 1 baud 🙃

@ReneKnuvers74rk Ай бұрын

Is there a particular reason why you didn’t hardwire the gnds for the relays?

@awesomecronk7183 Ай бұрын

You don't always want a relay coil wire directly to ground on one side. One example is doing XOR on the coil where you have one source/sink input to each side of the coil. If one of them is pulling to VDD and the other to GND, the coil energizes.

@dipdoting Ай бұрын

Actually, they are all grounded --- I just kept the pins there for symmetry. Originally I was thinking of not using a ground plane because sometimes you may want to activate the relay using the GND (like from a Darlington - that's what I did on the Static RAM memory card).

@CameronJamesH Ай бұрын

What's the smallest instruction set you can get away with?

@mheermance Ай бұрын

Google the PDP-8 and take a look at its instruction set. It had eight instructions, one of which allowed embedded microcode. Theoretically it is possible to build a single instruction set computer using conditional subtract (SUBLEQ), but no sane person would want to program it.

@awesomecronk7183 Ай бұрын

I have also done a single instruction computer, but my instruction was copy. Everything was mapped to an address and shared the same bus.

@mheermance Ай бұрын

@@awesomecronk7183 that sent me down a rabbit hole of triggered transport architectures. I have never heard of that before.

@dipdoting Ай бұрын

I guess it depends on what we want it to do. If the only instruction was a "NOP" then it would just happily click away with the clock. Like what @mheermance said, probably around 8 minimum to be able to do some interesting stuff.