I love stuff like this. One thing I've wanted for awhile, but not been able to find is off the shelf ASIC making. For instance, you could take a design like this, or something built for FPGAs, and then turn that into a contract manufacturer who would produce screens and then custom ASICs in low volume.<p>You can do this with PCBs and just about every other part of the hardware stack, but not ASICs.<p>Part of the reason, of course, is that laying out an ASIC is a time consuming and expensive proposition-- but I wonder if there isn't a huge opportunity to write software to take a FPGA configuration and algorithmically turn it into the screens to do lithography, which could then be sent to a fab. Of course you'd have to require specific processes and pre-defined submodules that represent the various gates.<p>Back when there was no ASICs for the scrypt hash I wanted to make one.<p>Anyway, I think there might be a huge opportunity there for someone with the skills.
If you like this, check out <a href="http://www.bigmessowires.com/bmow1/" rel="nofollow">http://www.bigmessowires.com/bmow1/</a> by my former boss. Very nice pictures and docs.
Do you think <a href="http://www.magic-1.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.magic-1.org/</a> is down because the CPU is overloaded from hacker news reader requests, or because it's no longer running? (sob). At least whois of the domain is still the maker.
I love this video of him getting it working for the first time. Must have felt so good :)<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEYaCAQLy4s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEYaCAQLy4s</a>
The web site hosted by a web server running on the Homebrew CPU seems to be offline. Here is a cached version: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20051103083029/http://magic-1.org/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20051103083029/http://magic-1.or...</a>
Pretty cool, I think the most amazing thing I read was that he's married with kids while building this. A little bit there, a little bit here and it all really does add up. Pretty neat.
One of the things that has long been on my bucket list is to do something along these lines.<p>Unfortunately, wire wrapping equipment is too expensive for me to justify to myself currently.
Connected to magic-1.org.<p>Escape character is '^]'.<p>I am sorry, but there is no free PTY left!<p>Connection closed by foreign host.<p>Guys, make room! I wanna play! :D
We put 2002 on this because that's what <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20020601000000*/http://www.homebrewcpu.com/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20020601000000*/http://www.homeb...</a> suggests, but if there's a more accurate date we can change it.