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Mechanical CPU Clock 37

Posted by Soulskill
from the time-flies-when-you're-watching-ALUs-flipflop dept.
An anonymous reader writes "I designed this CPU clock to help people learn about how a CPU works. The Mechanical CPU Clock shows the basic building blocks of a CPU (ALU, buses, RAM, registers, and a Control Unit). It executes a set of instructions which will emulate a simple wall clock. A detailed build/explanation is available on instructables.com."
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Mechanical CPU Clock

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  • Re:Put This on Slashdot TV (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 16, 2012 @02:51PM (#39703255)
    YES!!! Yes Yes yes! Perfect example! Mods, pay attention!

  • Re:Nice! But confused about writeup: (Score:3, Insightful)

    by lelazary (2619181) on Monday April 16, 2012 @05:06PM (#39704853)
    You are right. The [inc A, if A11 then IP=0 else IP=1] is actually one instruction that was optimised after the first prototype. Originally I had these as separate registers with three other flip flops at the top for the program counter. However, I noticed that I can remove that (which made the clock simpler and more compact) if I combined both instructions together and only use one ball drop for the inc and check. I would love to figure out other ways of explaining this to people who don't even know there is a CPU in a computer. So any suggestions are welcome.

I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning. -- Plato

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