I am a long-time electronics hobbyist and I accumulated quite a few different micro-controller boards over the years. I figured it would be nice to put them to some good use, but recently I find myself almost exclusively using the beefier kinds for the simplest of things, because everybody needs RTOS and WiFi to blink some LEDs, right? All of my simpler and less capable boards are just sitting there, collecting dust. Let's change that by... Blinking some LEDs. 🤷🏼

As these things tend to unfold, the project grew in scope a lot, and due to various complications I didn't actually make it on time for the holidays. I did get a blog post out of it, so my 2019 New Year's resolution of returning to blogging can now be marked as done!

So, I've got my Upduino boards the other day and found out that the available docs are spread throughout the internet, the code examples don't work or are missing build instructions, and the official manufacturer-supplied tools require multiple hard to remember and follow steps. I figured there's got to be a better way, so I'm describing it here.

So you've got your Upduino. What now?

Upduino is a dream come true for my 8-years-ago self - a cheap FPGA capable of holding nontrivial CPU designs that you can program in an easy way. Like an Arduino. Get it? Upduino. Arduino. Almost as if it were on purpose.

Cranking out another post took me way longer than I had anticipated when I rebooted this blog, but I got sidetracked by another quick hardware project that turned out to be way more involved and equally more fun than I originally thought...

I've designed an Atari 400/800/XL/XE standard cartridge compatible board that can hold up to 127 different standard 8KB and 16KB game ROMs at the same time. It's memory chip agnostic and features software game selection & a few neat hacks.