Project List

Forget about tiny flash memory, a full-sized hard drive is the only way to go! Here's my the new MP3 player board that reads standard FAT32 formatted hard drives, is designed to support a large DRAM buffer and to run from batteries, and is flash firmware upgradable.

The 8051 microcontroller family offers a very flexible and easy-to-use architecture which is still very popular, despite newer, much more "powerful" processors. Here are some of my tools, projects and bits of 8051 code which you may find useful.

The MIDI Drum Machine, designed and constructed in the Fall of 1991, was my first major 8051 based project. With some help from a musician, it turned out to be a very successful project, as you'll be able to see.

Programming an AVR chip with ISP using USB only, without any preprogrammed or special chips, only simple logic gates and resistors, and a USB hub.

Spin the disk drive platter and see how fast you can make it go. A whimsical gadget which now lives at Freegeek.

A circuit which interfaces a linear 128 pixel optical CCD Array detector to the parallel port of a computer. It features high-speed operation, automatic level corrections and gain control, and generally it works quite well.

I etch printed circuit boards, using low-cost chemicals and equipment. Here's a guided tour of the process.

The amplifier design used by OSU's IEEE student chapter for the circuit board workshop.

This full-custom VLSI IC was my first VLSI design. 6071 transistors are packed into a 2.2mm die fabricated in a 2 micron CMOS process. After resolving a communication problem with mosis, the final silicon actually worked!

A complete microprocessor, designed from the ground up, from instruction and register specification, to simulator/assembler, datapath and control. Xilinx implementation, that ran some code.

A simple downloader for the xilinx 4000 series which costs quite a lot less than the xilinx xchecker product... the design is freely distributed.

A simple project to make teaching the names of our 50 states to elementary school kids more fun.

An experimental project to try storing an index of integrated circuit pinouts in a web accessible form. Not very useful (yet, if ever), but some nifty cgi code.