Updates and new serial VFD modules

I'm finally moved in the new place, unfortunately there has been a lot of 'home things' that needed attention that have pushed back my electronic and software projects. I have been setting up my benches and unpacking my equipment this week in the new basement work area which I am very excited about. I should actually be able to start getting back into things this coming week.

Today my new serial VFDs showed up which has me pretty excited:

They are two line by 20 character display with both an 8 bit 5v parallel and up to 19200bps serial interface. Vacuum fluorescent displays just have a nice glow to them that contrasts the typical look of an LCD display you see today. I plan on using one as a primary display interface for my CPU project among other things.

CPU From Scratch

I haven't been posting too much lately, mostly because I have taken on a very ambitious project. I have decided to create an entire CPU from scratch using only TTL based logic. This project has been in the works for about two months now and I finally have something to show for it. Because this project is going to be more in-depth than most I have dedicated an entire wiki to it which can be located at bradthx.net.

As it stands now I have an 8-bit CPU that is able to load and store instructions into address and instruction registers from memory. This proves (along with a lot of additional debugging) that my design seems solid and I can begin designing my opcode and burning it to eproms. I will update this blog when I make major milestones, but all the technical data will be located at bradthx.net.