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 NANDputer lives! 
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Joined: Wed Jan 16, 2013 2:33 am
Posts: 165
NANDputer lives!

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First on the list is the NANDputer. What is a NANDputer? it’s a computer made out of nothing but NAND gates of course! I dunno why, but I thought it’d be fun to make this. I first had to work out how various parts of a CPU would be made out of NANDs, did a bunch of tests and went to town.

The design took about 2 months to come up with and make. At the bottom of the post is a few statistics on gate usage and count of each type (2 input, 3 input, 4 input, etc). As I suspected, the quantity vs. gate input count follows a pretty steep curve, with most gates being 2 inputs, and the fewest being 13 input gates.


http://blog.kevtris.org/?p=62


Sun Mar 17, 2013 1:24 pm
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Joined: Wed Jan 09, 2013 6:54 pm
Posts: 1780
Thanks for the post Chuck, but we need a photo... here's the ALU board - one of several plugged into a backplane:

Image

Cheers
Ed


Sun Mar 17, 2013 10:15 pm
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Joined: Tue Dec 11, 2012 8:03 am
Posts: 285
Location: California
That's amazing. It's so useless, and yet so useful, useful because of all that is learned in the process of making it. It reminds me of BMOW and of Dieter's processor made of discrete transistors. As he pust it, "This is art." And yes, there's a reason people take the time to paint a picture when it would be so much easier to just photograph the scene. (I tried a little painting in high school, but then got super interested in photography.)

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Mon Mar 18, 2013 3:32 am
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Joined: Tue Jan 15, 2013 5:43 am
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Thanks for the link, Chuckt. I got a big grin out of this project. :) It reminds me of some (half-) joking comments shared years ago with some computer buddies of mine. We were pursuing the same line of though: namely, a computer built with low-integration components. Rather than NAND gates, we proposed to use nothing but Open Collector inverters (such as 7405). In our discussions we laughingly referred to this most basic of elements as the "BUT Gate."

We had a lot of fun, and thought our approach (it was just talk) represented a delightfully low level of of integration -- VSSI, you might say, rather than VLSI! But Dieter put us all to shame by using even lower integration... and actually building a working unit! :shock:

Jeff
http://LaughtonElectroncs.com

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Wed Mar 20, 2013 5:40 pm
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