BYTEC/16

Getting closer (slowly)

Oct

19

2010

It’s been nearly a month since I last posted. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been much progress recently. I have only a few hours every week which I can fully spend on project activities. Big part of the reason is that I will be moving from Poland to Germany for a while, and there is a lot ...

Base memory PCB soldered

Sep

21

2010

Soldering is so much faster than wire wrapping, and my last evening’s session proves that. I managed to complete my base memory PCB in two hours, from workshop setup to actual soldering to plugging all parts into their sockets. This exercise was so encouraging that I am seriously considering building the ALU part of the ...

Main CPU board assembly completed

Sep

20

2010

I have finally completed wire-wrapping the CPU’s main board. It consists of 82 ICs, 51 power filter caps, 26 resistors, one oscillator, one power led, one reset button, two HP hexadecimal displays, two 64-pin IDC headers, a molex power connector and lots of AWG 30 kynar wiring. In fact, there is around 1600 wires, and ...

First PCB

Aug

27

2010

The base memory PCB described in one of the previous posts arrived in mail a week ago. The manufacturing and shipping process took BatchPCB (and USPS) exactly three weeks. Not bad, considering my design was first delivered to them on-line, then they had to lay out an entire panel of other peoples’ designs, then the ...

Got case 2

Aug

6

2010

Last time I mentioned I would be using a standard 19-inch rack mounted case to house my machine. Well, I just got one from eBay. It is a used unit but in a very good condition, and fully tested by the seller. The labels in the back indicate it was decommissioned from Deutsche Post. Unfortunately, ...

Memory Board

Jul

28

2010

I ran out of kynar wire and was forced to take a break from wrapping so I decided to take this opportunity and design a custom PCB for my memory module. Since this was my first attempt to lay out a board, it took me over a week – much longer than I had expected (yes, I ...

Getting closer (slowly)

Base memory PCB soldered

Main CPU board assembly completed

First PCB

Got case 2

Memory Board

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