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Welcome to the world, little one.

Meet the very first Sprout24 CPU, fully assembled tonight for the first time.

25 circuit boards, 2600+ components, 730 LEDs, 1000+ integrated circuits, 9700+ logic gates, and over 29,000 transistors.

She's going to be a thing of poetry when she starts executing code.

I've tested each board individually, but have yet to apply power to the entire thing. I'm not sure I'm ready yet to dare try.

Kevin Karhan :verified:

@autumn is a new ?

Cuz I've not heard of it before, and I'm shure neither has @stman or anyone in that area...

@kkarhan @autumn What a nice design. This is what it takes to create a digital thing where you can proudly pretend that there is no NSA backdoored IC in it for sure at 100%.

@stman @kkarhan If this thing manages to talk to the NSA, then I officially give up. :)

@kkarhan @stman I am still thinking about my plans for this going forward. But I expect that open sourcing it along with writing some educational resources, would be the best way to give people the chance to experiment and learn with it.

It's all just starting to emerge from the "chaos on the workbench" stage, so this is just an introduction to say hello. I'll be adding plenty of tech details on the website once things settle down a little.

@autumn Were all your PCB generated "manually" the old way with KiCad or did you use some special automated tools from a VHDL source code ?

@kkarhan

@stman @kkarhan I did these all manually in KiCad. I'd never designed a PCB before this project, so it was a fantastic chance to get up to speed in a hurry.

@kkarhan @stman Yes, it's a new ISA from scratch. It's a lightly-pipelined RISC-style 24-bit architecture designed with an eye toward teaching about computer science.

This is just an introduction... I'll be sharing more technical details here and on the website after I get through this round of testing.