Alan Kay said, “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” Not sure that I agree, but I’m definitely a software engineer who likes to make his own hardware. This tutorial will lay the foundations for hardware design using relatively low-cost tools.Why design your own hardware? A few possible reasons:It gives […]

This blog post was supposed to get the previous tutorial’s UART running on real hardware. However, my plans were derailed swiftly starting with a glitch.The tutorial’s design would have allowed you to switch an LED on and off remotely, as per the following:When an ‘E’ character is received, then the LED will be switched on, […]

At the end of the previous tutorial I hinted that there was a flaw in the UART’s design. Did you find it? The problem is the prescaler (or clock divider); it doesn’t deliver an accurate clock. Today, we’re going to fix that.The ProblemThe generated clocks aren’t exactly the values that they should be. Let’s do […]

Last time we got the simplest of digital circuits working: an LED flasher. Now its time to move on to something more interesting. We’re going to design a serial communication module so that our hardware can communicate with other devices.Communication instantly adds an element of interactivity. We’ll be able to send commands to the hardware […]