Thursday, August 23, 2012

4-bit ALU


This is the beginning of DupinComp. Though I don't quite know all the parts I need or the final design, I'm impatient, so I'm building the ALU before finishing the book. I haven't done any electrical engineering before, and I know very little about electricity, so I'm starting off with a 4-bit ALU. If it ends up not working, or I end up frying anything, then I've wasted less time and money than if I wired the 16-bit ALU I'll eventually need.  Here are all the components I'm using:

3 840 hole breadboards
3 spools of wire (1 green, 1 red, 1 black)
Arduino UNO (power supply)
2 DIP 8 slide switches (CTS 206-8)
4 NAND gates (sn74ls00n)
4 AND gates (sn74ls08n)
1 OR gate (sn74ls32n)
4 MUX gates (sn74hct157n)
1 Full Adder (sn7483n)

*Note: This list may change, if I find I need more parts

Though I planned out what I needed based on a design I had already tested with software, I'm tweaking it a little bit. Once I've written it down in HDL (hardware description language, for those who haven't read the book), I'll probably upload it.



4 comments:

  1. get more colors of wire. red is power, black is ground. you've just one one color for everything else. :(

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    1. Yeah, I went looking for some more colors yesterday, but I couldn't find any locally :( Guess I'll just order some online.

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  2. Awesome plan (Came here from Reddit). I've often thought about attempting this myself. I am an EE major and just recently finished a digital electronics class. Our final group project was designing a 4-bit control unit with some basic ALU functions. I'm really interested so I've added you to my Google reader feeds. Hope I might be able to throw something in there to help some time.

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    1. Great, thanks! I might take you up on that offer :)

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