On 09/05/2016 01:13 PM, Stephen wrote:
> On 5/9/2016 11:20 AM, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
>> Tangentially:
>>
>> https://hackaday.com/2016/04/30/megaprocessor-is-a-macro-microprocessor/
>
> There are some strange people in the world. I've read about a couple of
> projects like that.

Personally, I say well played to the guy. It must have cost him a damned 
*fortune* to do all this!

I see so many projects that are all like "an entire computer built using 
only 7400s"... and then you realise they actually meant "ICs in the 74xx 
product catalog", not just the 7400 itself. So that means entire 
flip-flops, adders, counters, encoders, etc in a single chip, not the 
individual logic gates you were expecting. And then you find out it uses 
off the shelf 64KB RAM chips. And then the guy added a "graphics card" 
that's actually a Raspberry Pi. So... an entire computer with 2,000,000x 
the processing power of the "computer" you're building? :-P And at this 
point, all kind of credibility is kinda lost.

At least *this* project appears to be doing stuff for real. And he's 
obviously given a lot of thought to making it *visual* what's going on, 
which is nice. Aesthetics are often forgotten on hard-core electronics 
projects like this.

>> Apparently the LEDs consume most of the power. And where I was thinking
>> that LEDs are extremely low-power...
>
> He uses 10,548 LEDs and at 20 milliamps a pop. That makes, how many
> amps...?
>
> Now how does he do that?

I've never built any circuit that uses more than about 3 LEDs. Which 
means the power used by the LEDs is negligible. I guess I failed to 
anticipate how things stop being negligible when you have a metric tonne 
of them! :-P

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