My first serious ASIC project

recently I presented you a project where I banned a Rick Roll gift to silicon and people seem have to enjoy that as mentioned in that video that rickoll was part of tiny Tapo 2 which is an open source shared silicon which means there are many more projects on that chip hence why it's so affordable to take part in that the Rick Roll gift was actually a meme project that I put in last minute before doing that I submitted three other projects that have a real world use the way tiny Tapo 2 worked was that the projects were addressed sequentially so it was only possible to clock the inputs and outputs of the chip in the kilohertz range thankfully this changed for the new tiny Tapout runs I made a lightsaber 5 years ago that used the gyroscope and neopixels to display images in midair that was cool and I thought this also would be possible with the kilohertz clock of tiny Tapout 2 So the plan was to make a simple controller that would be able to display graphics or text on a rotating fan or something since we have an output of 8 Bits we can just display a column of eight monochrome pixels anyways good enough for text and some basic Graphics my first attempts were just to clock in the data in a right mode and then just clock them out in the output mode the same thing would be also achievable with just some regular shift registers the problem was that in the limited space of a tile on Tiny Tio 2 I was only able to fit in about 20 to 30 Columns of pixels that resolution is not high enough to write any text and the graphics would be basic at best so in the third attempt I decided to combine a fixed character set and Graphics I was able to fit in 30 words of seven bits the highest significant bit would decide if the word represents a column of pixels or a whole character of 8 by8 pixels from a character ROM that's on the Asic itself and you know from my rig Roll Project that I was only able to fit in like 450 bytes of data as a ROM in there so I also had to limit the character set so I made a wide list of characters that I want to put in the character ROM it ended up being the capital letters digits and some commonly used special characters I made a simple JavaScript tool that took an image of the CGA character set extracted the pixels of those characters and just generated a big very lck case so in the end this project was able to display a mix of 30 characters or pixel columns making it a 240x 8 pixels resolution if you use only text which was good enough and had an actual character the benefit of using verilog is that you can put it on an fpga and actually test it and I did so and it worked so I submitted it to Tiny TPO 2 and waited my8 months at the last dead superon Matt handed me one of the first tiny PP out two boards and I immediately had to just sld a mock up to test my project I just used one of my VGA boards on the back to control the input of the characters and the output clock and I was really amazed to see it working as mat gave me a few of those as6 back at home I designed a board that would be more lightweight than this one and where I could actually run this project properly I designed it with some mounting holes in the center diic on the front but also an ESP 32 on the back yeah actually we need some way of uploading the characters and Graphics that we want to be displayed in addition to that I added a hall effect sensor to measure the RPMs and the mosfet to drive a DC motor since the whole thing would rotate I also added a connector for a battery I ordered the boards at my longtime sponsor Isela I like Isa for my prototyping projects because they're super quick have good quality pcbs and stencils the budget option with the free shipping is really competitive if you don't need your boards to be shipped within one business day but even for a professional setting Isa is a good partner providing you a good customer service assembly options and the manufacturing is based in the EU which might be a critical point for some projects if you're interested check out the link in the description and use the code Bard Looney to get a few bucks off your order as usual the BS arrived within a few days so I could continue to assemble it before my brain was able to mentally move on to a new project oh yeah since this PCB has a lot of different components I used isa's assembly guide to help me place the parts if you uploaded your project file while either by using their extension or by uploading on the website it will have all the information needed to place the parts I stencl the front side with the Asic first the back side has just the ESP 32 that can also be solded by hand if needed in my last video with this Mega cluster I sought a thousand components by hand and you shouted at me to use a vacuum pump instead of tweezers and I totally agree tweezers get always sticky and I actually have the pixel pump since recently the pump came with eight of these snd magazines and I must admit I love these things usually I try to juggle all my standard components in those big reels and it's a mess and now I could just roll in a few hundred in each of those and dispense them easily to pick with the pump with the port pedal you can just turn on the vacuum and release it again what I didn't know is that you can ATT attach a second pedal and actually switch to the next part Isa supports the second pedal in their assembly guide as th ibomb if you use that but the best part about using a pump is that you can keep the LEDs just oriented and place them all within seconds without checking the orientation I just realized it in this project and I don't want to use tweezers for that anymore check it out I linked it in the description as well and here comes the pure gold one of the rarest as6 [Music] after reflowing I just removed some slda bridges from the qfn which is really simple and added some slda to the USB [Music] receptacle since I used low temperature soda paste I also wanted to use it for the ESP 32 trying to also connect the thermal pad on the bottom made it really hard to sort on the module at the end it worked with the hot air gun [Music] I also added the hall effect sensor and that was basically it ready to test it didn't turn on okay nothing happens nothing gets warm here so it seems there is a minor inconvenience somewhere it seems the ESB was a little bit shifted and uh shorted a few pins 3.3 volts which wasn't that good we'll bump it into place the issue is that that we have too much soda on the on the thermal pad below using the hot air didn't help much I wasn't able to move it even a bit so I put it on the small hot blade and turn it upside down so I won't lose the components on the front side it's moving it's moving it's moving it's p32 F that worked but the the temperature was so high I even lost the can of the esp32 we lost the can I shouldn't put it to 200° yeah where we go we don't need Ami shielding yeah all right I saw that it back on without the [Music] can wait this is not what I expected blink. is working that's cool that seemed to fix it and I was able to continue to add the [Music] battery to be able to charge the battery I just used one of those old school charging circuits and added the same type of jsd connector to it yeah that will do later I change it for a smaller one but oh well okay it uploaded Moment of Truth as spare you all the debugging that had to happen this time as well but here's the first working test yeah there you go there you go it works oh oh it died it died it died it died oh here we go so this is graphics and this is DET text here we go the patience paid off now we can see that I changed the shutter you can actually see something displaying there next part would be to attach a motor and make it rotate so we have an controlled environment to display any text and Graphics I used Fusion to design something that would attach a DC motor that I found in one of my bins understand that I would be able to either put on the table or Mount somewhere [Music] keeping all the small screws and bolts finally paid off this time I found two that would be fitting and attach the motor how I would attach the magnet to the stand wasn't blend out it just has to be close to the passing hall effect sensor so I just use a bolt hot glued it in and put a small magnet on top who planed this [Music] device I will glue it to the captain tape here Captain tape be good enough yeah and here it is this is the result you can see some text and also the graphics there is a heart and a smiley here turning the device on wouldn't start it immediately you have just to flick it and once the hall effect sensor is triggered once it tries to keep constant RPMs that would match the text since depending on graphics and text the resolution may vary a PID controller would be more suited to control that I also tried to add Wi-Fi capabilities but when I knocked off the can of the esp32 it seems I also removed few passives from the antenna so I actually had to replace the es again the Wi-Fi works but H oh well you know how ESB projects work they tend to crash and then you give up at this point I'm really satisfied that my controller on the ASC works and that's all I wanted to show I'm looking forward to testing the high clock speeds that are possible now with tiny tape out my current project is trying to design my own CPU and put it on there but that might be so big that we might need to submit a project to chip ignite directly at ealas and get the whole Asic for ourselves anyways I hope you like this project thank you to IA for sponsoring this check out the pixel pump and big thanks to all my supporters on patreon GitHub PayPal Channel subs and twitch see you next time bye I don't even know if the flash chip is flashed I just I I found just a bunch of loose flash chips and I don't know which one was programmed and and which not so I don't even know if Caravel is running

Channel: bitluni

Views: 40,757

Keywords: maker, diy, electronics, tinkering, ASIC, PCB, PCBA, Manufacturing, Silicon, Chip manufacuring

Id: aKvq-eQnwNM

Length: 13min 14sec (794 seconds)

Published: Fri May 31 2024