This is an absolutely incredible adventure story about designing – and failing, and designing again – a homemade graphics card for the Amiga 2000, from Lukas F. Hartmann:
I decided in October 2015 in a feat of madness: “I’ll just make my own graphics card. How hard can it be?”
It turned out to be a very, very challenging project, but luckily I got much further than expected. On the way, I had to learn how to design a PCB and get it manufactured, how to work with SMD parts, how to program in Verilog and synthesize code for an FPGA, how SDRAM and DVI/HDMI work (or how to get them to do at least something). I also had to find out how to write a driver for the sadly closed/undocumented Picasso96 “retargetable” graphics stack for AmigaOS 3.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
