A Z80 computer wirewrapped on perfboard. The wirewrapping technique uses standard IC sockets and PCB header pins, so the components and wiring are on the same side of the board.
This is such cool engineering. I wish I had more time and base knowledge to dive into making things like this myself. I absolutely love building LEGO sets, and this feels like very, very advanced LEGO.
Wirewrapping anything above laughable complexity is a nightmare I wouldn’t wish on my fiercest enemies. Though expensive motorized tools may exist that take care of the stripping, wrapping and dispensing, and save your sanity for the debugging part.
Been there, done that, don’t miss it.
Designing a PCB is much more fun; it satisfies your compulsive obsessive self letting you shift tracks and components here and there to perfect beauty and maximum simplicity, lets you use surface mounted IC’s, and the result can survive bumps and drops and mistreatment.
Not to mention he made it exponentially harder on himself by wirewrapping the TOP of the board! Who does that? You wirewrap on the reverse side of the pcb to avoid having to go around chips like he did.
But he saved exponentially more money.
Wirewrap sockets are silly priced and hard to source.
There’s probably $50 in wire wrap sockets just for that board.
It IS more expensive to get wire-wrap sockets, but not THAT much.
At Digikey, those wire-wrap sockets would be less than $20 total. Making a nightmare of wiring just to save $20 is penny-wise, pound-foolish.
Have…have you seen “modern” PC board toolsets?
Apparently, The Industry settled on a specific way to do electronic “cad” back in, oh, I dunno, 1980.
And then decided that the user interface and idioms are “just fine”, and have thus replicated and maintained them all these long years.
To a novice (especially THIS novice), those systems are unintuitive. You know that thing on the screen that looks like every paint or draw program since MacPaint/MacDraw? Yea, that’s not how it works. That’s not how any of it works.
Then there’s the excitement of sourcing components for the program, trying to find something appropriate from the multiple thousands of parts available. Especially “common” parts. (Do you have any idea how many parts are “headers”?)
And, naturally if YOUR part, the one that YOU want to use couldn’t be found, well, the hits just keep coming.
*I* tried several times, with a couple of different systems. A very painful process for me. I can readily see someone punting on all that (don’t forget once you design the board, you have to ship it all off, get it made, get it sent back, and THEN check to find whatever it is that you overlooked in all of those cross checks before you sent it is now permanently embossed on your shiny new board, so you can cut the trace or add a jumper, assuming your components even fit.).
No doubt it all gets better with experience, but for someone who just wants to try wiring to gather some ICs to make Wumpus, it’s a big step just to get “hello world” up.
There’s always breadboarding, but that has problems of its own.
PCB layout is far more complex than just “painting” lines. Well, it is for anything more than a couple of parts. It sounds like you’re at the stage where you’d be better off making your own PCB manually. Actually DRAW it in a paint program, print it out onto special paper, transfer it to a copper-clad PCB, etch it, and then solder on the components. I did that on my first few boards.
Once you reach a certain complexity, using something like ki-cad will be MUCH easier than trying to draw it in Photoshop, and it’s never been cheaper and faster to get custom PCBs made. But it doesn’t sound like you’re ready for that just yet. Look into the process I mention above to make your own. It’s fun in its own way, and not that tough.
Think about all the cools things you can run on a Z80. OK, done. 🙂
This headline was a letdown. I thought someone had built a wire-wrap computer from discrete components (similar to this: http://www.homebrewcpu.com/overview.htm) that used the Z80 instruction set.
This is just a processor connected to some memory. He even cheated and used a Programmable Gate Array for the address decoding.
Everyone with a computer engineering degree did something similar to this in college.
I was looking at possibly wire wrapping this project on hackaday.
https://hackaday.io/project/20781-gigatron-ttl-microcomputer
No microprocessor