Benningtons.net

Stuff what I did

Archive for the ‘Electronic Stuff’ Category

Blinken Hex Lights —

Time to upgrade some of my binary Blinkenlights plug-ins to 7-segment LED hexadecimal versions. In the design of my Hol-1 8-bit CPU I have been leaving rows of pin headers for the attachment of LED indicators. Mainly because you can never have enough Blinkenlights twinkling on a homebrew computer but also because they have their […]

Maplin Minilab —

Published in the September 1983 edition of “Electronics, The Maplin Magazine” the Minilab didn’t even get a mention on the front cover but this DIY power supply with extras for the electronics experimenter was just what the teenage me had been looking for. This Minilab has already made an appearance on this website. Here it […]

Blinkenlights Plug-in —

Making an LED blinkenlights plug-in for monitoring 8-bit digital circuits. Why?: In my previous 8-bit CPU registers post I mentioned my concern about hard-wiring LEDs onto the CPU circuit boards. Whereas providing a series of 9-pin male headers offered more versatility: test points for a logic analyser, connection points for a console display, connection points […]

Logic buffers —

With computer programming I’m drawn toward low level languages. Somehow hoping to understand what all the 1’s and 0’s are doing to truly feel in control of the computer. An understanding of those basic building blocks is really important even though using them in most projects would be too time consuming and error prone. With […]

More 8×8 LED matrix —

As I mentioned in my previous LED matrix post, there is no need to use 16 Arduino outputs to drive an 8×8 LED matrix when a serial interface and 5 pins could be used. But whilst I’ve got this basic version wired-up then I thought I’d just try using bitmaps and scrolling. So this is […]

8×8 LED Matrix —

For some variety I thought I’d add an electronics post to this website. This isn’t really a complete project but more of a hacking session with an 8×8 LED matrix. Taking time to understand and experiment with even such a basic component is a useful way of learning tricks that can be incorporated into future […]