Thanks for liking our #OPC-5 - a CPU for FPGA, in one page project, YG, which has grown now from the 16-bit OPC-5 to the more capable but still 16-bit OPC-6 to the simpler but larger 32-bit OPC-7 - and each of them just one page!

Yay ! I see the progress, it is inspiring :-)

Thanks for following me!

Hi Yann! Thanks another time for the likes! 

Thanks for all the likes yann :D

Hey Yann! Thanks for the likes, and more! Good luck this year!

Hi Yann, thanks for liking the one transistor flipflop, https://hackaday.io/project/112126-one-transistor-flipflop !

Hey Yann and thanks for the follow and like for the Cardboard relay :-)

Hey, merci Yann pour #Smart remote for Pablo , ma nouvelle aventure de l'année  :-)

Hi Yann,

thanks for the like/skull for my online 3D "Brain simulator" NeuronZoo ! 

https://hackaday.io/project/19287-neuronzoo

I think you will see the similarity with programming a regular CPU and you will have no trouble making a small program for it !

Hey Yann, thanks for the love on #Obsidian :-)

Thats some super-saiyan support! :-D

Hello Yann...

Why so many CPU projects? I really don't understand. I've seen 13 CPU projects from you on hackaday. That's huge! And I'm pretty sure that there are some other projects missing on hackaday.
YGREC-ECL ; YGREC8 ; YGRECmos ; Discrete YASEP ; AMBAP ; SPDT16 ; YASEP ; YGREC-РЭС15-bis; YGREC-Si; YGREC16; FCPU (FC0 & FC1); YASEP ; microYasep...
It's really difficult to understand the organisation of all these projects, and therefore it is difficult to understand all your work.
Furtheremore, it seems that none of these projects is finished. Why? After so many years working on CPUs, no one is finished?
I think that you should concentrate on only one project, and finish it before starting a new one, and avoid dispersing with so many projects.
Finishing one project is a great reward... at least from my point of view. It's only an advice, you do what you want.
You have great knowledge and a lot of ideas about CPUs architectures. I really hope that you can show to us soon a finished project, a great project, with all this knowledge. I will be very happy to discover it.

Hello F4HDK, and thank you for your bits :-)

You raise several important questions and I'll try to address them here quickly.

"It's really difficult to understand the organisation of all these projects, and therefore it is difficult to understand all your work." Yes I agree and I still consider creating a "metaproject" but HaD is not flexible enough for this. It would probably be a "projects map", some sort of 2D graph that links and groups the projects depending on their purposes, characteristics etc.

But since I'm lazy AND crazy busy on other fronts (I have to earn my living) I'll do a quick recap on the subject that seems dear to our hearts.

"Why so many CPU projects? I really don't understand. I've seen 13 CPU projects from you on hackaday. That's huge!" This is because each project serves to explore a given angle. CPU architecture design is easy, "back of an envelope", and is not covered in many projects. However implementation is the real deal and it explains why the project count has bloated lately. The last aspect is that each project creates spin-offs when one problem requires a specific and new development.

But basically you can start with 3 major CPU families : F-CPU (64/32 bits), YASEP (32/16 bits) and YGREC (16/8 bits), in chronological order.

* #F-CPU  started around 1998, 20 years ago, I joined it and took more and more responsibilities, drafted the FC0 (a clever monster) and the project slowly died from bikeshedding. I vowed to revive it by fixing all the flaws (structural, organisational etc.) but I had to address all these flaws... You have to remember that 15 years ago, the state of Open Source Hardware was not what it is today. We had to re-invent everything and this greatly exceeded the project's scope. Oh and we wanted to create a desktop-class CPU when nobody had made a simple working one before.

* the #YASEP Yet Another Small Embedded Processor  is a much simpler core for a very different purpose/application, so I could focus on the tools and framework. It started as a 32 bits CPU and was soon able to be 16 bits wide too. It achieved "simulation status" around 2013 when it computed a Mandelbrot set.

It gave birth to #YGWM Whygee's JavaScript Window Manager  which is a crazy JS spaghetti monster. I joined HaD to find help to rewrite it from scratch with better coding patterns. I soon become exhausted from writing code (I missed the real action and my soldering iron was rusting) and started #Discrete YASEP  (with a specific use in mind). From there #DYPLED  appeared.

* The "discrete computer projects" are "toy computers" I've known about for along time (http://members.iinet.net.au/~daveb/simplex/ringhome.html was not created yesterday) and I finally gave in because I was fed up with software, I want to 1) touch what I do (much easier to debug) 2) teach about computers with stunning pieces of living electronics 3) have FUN !
Ideas crystalized with #AMBAP: A Modest Bitslice Architecture Proposal  and the YGREC family was born, with minimalism in mind, allowing me to have a taste of mythical technologies : #YGREC16 - YG's 16bits Relay Electric Computer  for relays, #YGRECmos  for the 74HC version, #YGREC-ECL   for ECL, #YGREC-Si    for discrete transistor logic... Again the project bloated (too many features) so I reduced the parts count with an even dumber 8-bits version #YGREC8  (my current focus, sticking to relays for now but wait for the spin-offs)

The YGREC provided me with a totally new perspective, more insight and added new rules to my CPU design play book. The underlying principles (laid out in AMBAP) are finding direct applications in the reboot of F-CPU, as the FC1, which is a cluster of "globules" (modified YGREC cores). The circle is closed now, I'm looking again at the F-CPU and I cover a wide range of applications, from 8 to 64+ bits, and certain projects interact with my professional work such as #WizYasep 

I'm happy I succeeded (mostly thanks to HaD) in escaping the "software trap" by going "back to the roots of computer design", I learn so much and I reinvest the knowledge, develop new techniques (the invention of balanced control trees is still amazing me) and writing VHDL code will be a breeze. However the real difficulty is everything around the CPU core : how do you control, drive it, feed it with data, debug, create code, etc. I address these with separate projects such as #HTTaP  but making an ecosystem around a processor is much more work than drafting a CPU core on a sheet of paper.

"none of these projects is finished. Why? After so many years working on CPUs, no one is finished?" Because apparently I'm more of a "researcher" type. The most advanced work is the YASEP (see http://news.yasep.org/). I have implemented and "finished" a few things, often mostly because they were pretty dumb OR because someone paid for it (like : artistic projects). The rest : I play with an idea, explore, learn, discover and get disturbed/interrupted by either a new better idea (you know, when you explore something deeply, you gain insight and find what assertions and assumptions were false) or (worse) work. Internal and external influences keep disrupting me, but also, I easily get bored once I think I've covered a subject. However,  with time, I've covered a pretty wide range of subjects and creating new things is faster and easier. With my new workshop, it's even more comfortable :-)

"You have great knowledge and a lot of ideas about CPUs architectures." This in itself is something else that I want to cover through my writings. What point is there to learn all those things if I can't transmit them ? I consider writing many articles about these subjects but it requires yet another project. Oh well, see #French articles (some under Creative Commons)  (and I haven't even scratched the surface about CPU design). Or "maybe" a book.

Damn.

"I really hope that you can show to us soon a finished project, a great project, with all this knowledge. I will be very happy to discover it." Me too, as you can imagine ! If YGREC8 (or any other) springs to life, I intend to tour DIY places (maybe even sell kits and develop #Grimoire ) and inspire people to do the same. Because it's just so awesome !

Contact me if you have any other questions.

Hi,

let me say something,

it is always much simplier and takes much less time to give advices, than to follow :( Though, look from the side can be a clue..

Metaproject it is very good idea, as big projects are always a hierarchy to be manageable and accountable and deliverable in the end.

Hobby is for fun but... Completed hobby project is more enjoy and fame, isn't it? :) It is maybe good to define metagoals in hierarchy then:

Top level goal for whole activity is... Your goal here :) To promote education into society etc etc.

Next level is to develop or proof new architectures (of whatewer people need) and find best by comparing etc.

Next lower level might be to research different logic families.

Even lower level goal  might be to research and compare hardware technologies like relays, MOSFETs, bipolar etc

And then, to save time, the idea is not to bring each arhitecture implemented in whole different tecnology up to the end. This is resource consuming, doing somewhat repeated work, and is the way to many unfinished projects.

Maybe just to make one block with relays other with mosfets and third with bipolar etc. Then you incorporate all your interests in single, layered metaproject, adored by visitors, and, very important, with optimized resource count.

This will impose additional problem to interface between different technologies though, it can be useful research on it's own.

The "metaproject" is a multi-dimensional network, I wanted to lay out everything at http://fhwd.org/ but the original one-page map would look messy...

Nice, thanks for Malleo, Yann. I feel an new project coming on lol.

thanks for the like yann :D

I'm happy to fan your flames, Dragon ;-)

Hey Yann, thanks for the follow and like of the Uglytech relay :-)

Thank YOU for showing kids how easy it is to do :-)

I even found a use for an old corroded fishing weight Lol

Bonjour Yann - Merci pour le suivi de mon nouveau projet #ALithiumIonBatteryManagement Sytsem - A+ - Michel

Merci Yann. Impressionné par tant de belles bidouilles ( au sens noble bien sûr )

De rien :-) bienvenue parmi les bidouilleurs !

Merci Beaucoup for following #Ugly USB !

You don't need to thank me everytime I click on something :-D

Thanks for following and for liking the #Mouse Aid

Thanks for liking my projects ;-)

Thanks for following my project: #$1/W True MPPT.

I enjoy your posts tremendously btw, keep up the good work.

Awwww thanks ! I'm happy that I can do things that are interesting, fun and useful :-)

Thankyou for the follow!

Thank you back :-) You're doing some interesting stuff !

And thanks again Yann for skulling my #Hackaday Stats!