The Ware for November 2024 is the NLP-16A by cherry-takuan. It’s a bespoke 16-bit CPU made entirely from 74HC00 NAND gates.

Even the D-flip flops are made from NAND gates:

Lots and lots of NAND gates…

I got to meet the maker, who goes by Cherry Takuan, at the Chiba Institute of Technology‘s 75th annual student festival. The NLP-16A was on display in a corner of the Denken electronics club (there’s also a rival club at the event, CITera). I was a little in disbelief at first, but after a bit of hemming and hawing I convinced myself this was in fact a full 16-bit CPU made out of nothing but NAND gates (the I/O card and RAM/ROM are separate). It’s double-cool in that the whole thing is up on github (here’s the schematics) and all the tooling (assembler, demo applications, etc.) are there as well. This was apparently a high school project that grew out of control and he’s now on his 6th year working on it. I wonder if he’d be interested in making a version in SKY130 with eFabless or TinyTapeout. Could stick with the “entirely NAND gate” theme, even in silicon, because why not?

I love this kind of stuff, and it’s heartening to know there’s still engineering students who have a hankering to build stuff out of nothing but NAND gates and solder — and will take the time to do it, instead of chasing the latest AI-crazed startup idea. In retrospect, I could grow into who I am today only because I cut my teeth on gritty projects like this (although not nearly as ambitious!), back when I was his age.

For example, above is a 48-bit wide VLIW audio DSP I made for a “6.111” lab project when I was an undergraduate at MIT…I “cheated” (compared to cherry-takuan’s all-7400 flex) and used some PLA devices, ROMs, and SRAMs to improve density. Unfortunately it was all breadboards so it was ripped up shortly after the class ended. This potato-quality photo is all I have left of it, but this was all pre-Internet, and about as good as we could do back then to preserve a design for sharing if you were a cash-strapped undergraduate with nothing but disposable film camera (remember those?).

Congrats to Alastair for nailing this one. Email me for your prize!

The Ware for November 2024 is shown below. Click on any image for a larger version.

I have a policy of never using one of my own projects for name that ware. But, sometimes I see another person’s project in the wild and it is just too cool not to share! I came across this ware recently and fell in love with it instantly. It’s the sort of thing I’ve always dreamed of doing, but didn’t have the resources to do it when I had the time, and when I finally had the resources, I no longer had the time.

The images for this month are somewhat redacted to make it a little more challenging, but … you might get an idea of what’s going on, and yah, it’s exactly that. How cool! I’ll share more details next month. My gut tells me one of my subscribers is going to have seen this thing somewhere already on the Internet, so I’m betting there will be an ID on it shortly in the comments, despite the redactions.

Last month’s ware were boards from a Sony HCD-T1. Thanks again to spida for contributing the ware, and congratulations to marcan for nailing it. Ping me if you want a prize!

The Ware for October 2024 is shown below.

This one should be a smidge easier to guess than last month’s ware. The main reason I liked this ware is actually the board shown below with the prominent star-routing. It’s such traditional hand-routing work, I love craftsmanship like this.

For completeness, this is the top side of the board shown above:

Thanks to spida for sharing this ware!

Also, just in time for Halloween, this spooky ware made its way to my desk:

This is the “fuse box” that was connecting my flat to the power mains. I live in one of the oldest buildings in Singapore; I’m pretty sure this is part of the original wiring, which makes it over 50 years old. I guess at some point, someone decided to replace the fuse with a…wire.

OK, sure.

That’s spooky enough as it is … but also not so spooky, given that downstream of it are two very modern circuit breaker boxes with GFIs. So, I think its sole purpose was to give the power company a “switch” to disconnect the power meter from the mains, if they had to service the meter.

However, the fuse cartridge probably also played some role in pushing the copper fingers into the receptacle, so without the fuse in place, the fingers were not pushing firmly against the terminal block. Over time, one of the fingers turned into a miniature electron milling experiment.

The air quality sensor in my place had ticked up slightly a couple days ago, and I thought maybe it was the haze coming back; but then last night I smelled an acrid smell I know all too well, and when I poked my head out I heard the slight crackling of electricity arcing coming from the mains panel, and knew I had to drop everything and look for the source of trouble.

So, the servers were down for a bit yesterday, but at least I have power now and only a slightly charred mounting board at the power entry point of the unit, instead no electricity and an entirely charred unit. My place is now slightly less cursed, but if I were to be honest, this is probably not the most cursed circuit on the premises…my lab is a veritable crypt of cursed circuitry!

Last month’s Ware was a Cue COVID test reader. It uses LAMP (loop-mediated isothermal amplification) to perform a fast and sensitive detection of nucleic acid sequences. Thanks again to Curtis Galloway for contributing this ware for me to take apart and photograph!

Nobody had guessed the ware exactly, but “microfluidic lab on a chip” is a pretty fair generic description of a LAMP reader, so I’ll give the prize to Jimmy. Congrats and email me for your prize!

I had perhaps gotten a bit overzealous with the image redaction, but here is the connector on the PCB that I had blurred out previously. I figured this connector would have been a dead ringer for the mating Cue cartridge.

One other interesting facet – the miniature optical interrupters I highlighted previously are used to detect when the assembly shown above is no longer flush to the circuit board. It’s basically a set of very strong magnets on a flexible polymer membrane.

I’m not quite sure how it works as I’ve never used the test myself, but I seem to recall the test cartridge having a slug of metal in it that would mate with this magnet. Probably, the magnets help to hold the test in place and make firm contact with the connector while giving positive feedback to the user it’s been inserted correctly, and the interrupters allow the circuitry to know when the cartridge is all the way in. The entire thing is constructed to resist some amount of accidental liquid exposure, so this perhaps explains the need for a mechanism to detect cartridge insertion via a sealed, flexible polymer membrane.