iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Mike Bell

Eike @zet23t.mastodon.gamedev.place.ap.brid.gy · 23/09/2026

I notice I didn't announce this: The demo version of 8-bitBot is available on steam: store.steampowered.com/app/4820640/… It is available for Windows and Linux. If you decide to give a try, I am grateful for any feedback that you may have :) #gamedev #indiedev #solodev #raylib

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Reposted by Mike Bell

rar is win @xyla.zip · 28/09/2026

drugs, ?????

Wine (from a Wikipedia-style site)

Wine is an alcoholic drink made from
fermented fruit (typically grapes) which causes
Linux users to enter a mental state that allows
them to run Microsoft Windows applications in
their mind.

[photo]
Red and white wine, served in cool glasses.

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Reposted by Mike Bell

TheZoq2 @thezoq2.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 20/09/2026

One of the coolest things to happen in Spade yet 👀 @breakingtaps wrote and taped out a Transport Triggered Architecture processor from scratch in a month with 0 prior experience! This video is also one of the better intros to digital hardware design I've seen, certainly much better than some of […]

mastodon.social

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Mike Bell @rebelmike.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 21/08/2026

I've been playing more at micro-optimizations for Baochip's BIO. It turns out that if you have a non-compressed instruction that straddles a word boundary that takes 5 cycles, so in general you probably want compression disabled to keep performance predictable. But you can turn RVC on […]

hachyderm.io

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Mike Bell @rebelmike.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 20/08/2026

I think the idea of the BIO design makes a lot of sense though - and increasing throughput to 2 clocks per instruction should be straightforward without increasing area or compromising timing significantly. Rotate instructions would be rather helpful too, as would andn/orn and bit reverse, so it […]

hachyderm.io

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Mike Bell @rebelmike.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 20/08/2026

I've been playing with BIO, the baochip-1x's alternative to PIO, for a bit now so I thought I'd write up some thoughts. Overall, BIO is a lot more flexible than PIO - instead of state machines with very limited instruction memory that are dedicated to controlling GPIOs, you have 4 small RISC-V […]

hachyderm.io

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Mike Bell @rebelmike.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 15/08/2026

Well nothing much has changed visually, but now I have the LED blinking using a BIO (the dabao's version of PIO) program. Also found the C SDK left the BIO running at half speed and found some registers to poke to fix that.

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Mike Bell @rebelmike.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 15/08/2026

I received my dabao boards. So it’s LED blinking time! This is in Micropython - thanks @matt_trentini for the port.

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Mike Bell @rebelmike.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 31/07/2026

Another project that was originally on TT09: a run length encoded video player, this time with audio! Here it is playing Bad Apple, audio captured through my phone’s terrible mic. Unfortunately only the first minute fits on the 16MB flash this time as the audio […] [Original post on hachyderm.io]

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Mike Bell @rebelmike.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 30/07/2026

OK, got this working with HSTX. With the drive strength on the clock and data inputs turned up, it runs cleanly at up to 268MHz!

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Reposted by Mike Bell

Liam Proven @lproven.social.vivaldi.net.ap.brid.gy · 29/07/2026

SAVE JODRELL BANK – Protect a national treasure of science, heritage & inspiration c.org/fCZVFS2YYj Reverse funding cuts that would end 80Y of world-leading UK science. Home to the iconic Lovell Telescope, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, & the heart of UK radio astronomy – faces losing […]

social.vivaldi.net

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Mike Bell @rebelmike.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 30/07/2026

I verified this running correctly at a 200MHz clock last night, and haven't yet hit the limit. So that's good news if you want to send data into a sky130 design on Tiny Tapeout! Though be aware the outputs are much (much!) slower than the inputs. To go faster I need to work out sending the data […]

hachyderm.io

Original post on hachyderm.io

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Mike Bell @rebelmike.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 30/07/2026

In the quest for more speed, and to test things that haven't been tested (much), I used the "high speed" sky130 standard cells for this design, instead of the "high density" cells that TT projects on sky130 normally use. I'm pleased to report that the hs library does work, and the design runs […]

hachyderm.io

Original post on hachyderm.io

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Mike Bell @rebelmike.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 30/07/2026

TT sky25a also has a decoder I made for 8b10b encoding. This design allows two 8-bit numbers to be decoded and then multiplied together. This came about from discussing how fast a standard Tiny Tapeout design could be clocked and still reliably receive data (preferably from the RP2 on the […]

hachyderm.io

Original post on hachyderm.io

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Mike Bell @rebelmike.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 30/07/2026

I stacked 16 of these into a 16-bit counter, and using the RP2350 on the Tiny Tapeout demoboard to send fixed numbers of clock pulses in, I've verified it counts correctly at up to 198MHz! At 200MHz the propagation delay becomes too much so the top bit of the count goes wrong. This suggests the […]

hachyderm.io

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Mike Bell @rebelmike.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 30/07/2026

The image shows the design for the half adder. Transistors are formed where the red polysilicon layer crosses either the orange layer (to form a P MOSFET), or the green layer (to form an N MOSFET). The layers on top of that are wiring.

A screenshot from VLSI magic showing the layout of my half adder. You can count 4 pmos and 5 nmos transistors.

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Mike Bell @rebelmike.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 30/07/2026

Besides TinyQV I have several other designs on the sky25a Tiny Tapeout chip, and so far they seem to be working well! My first attempt at designing at the transistor level went well: I made a half adder and then manually placed and routed that into a 16-bit counter, using a flip-flop from the […]

hachyderm.io

Original post on hachyderm.io

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Reposted by Mike Bell

mole99 @mole99.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 30/07/2026

wafer.space Run 2 is now officially in production! 🥳🚀 In short, wafer.space (wafer.space) offers low-volume silicon manufacturing of 1,000 custom silicon chips for the open-source GF180MCU process. Like last time, this shuttle features some […] [Original post on fosstodon.org]

The reticle layout of wafer.space Run 2 with private projects obfuscated.

The project IDs of all the projects in the shuttle.

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Reposted by Mike Bell

abadidea @0xabad1dea.infosec.exchange.ap.brid.gy · 29/07/2026

Okay, we have a new contender for Most AI Thing to Ever Happen 1) July 25th: someone messes around with an LLM and posts a proof of the Collatz conjecture that does, in fact, verify in the theorem prover. (The AI use is not disclosed on the github page) github.com/xrchz/CollatzLean 2) […]

infosec.exchange

Original post on infosec.exchange

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Mike Bell @rebelmike.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 28/07/2026

I received the #TinyTapeout sky25a chip, that has the RISC-V peripheral competition versions of my TinyQV SoC on it. There’s lots to play with here, and it’s great to see things are working well. Micropython launches at up to 90MHz, which is faster than […] [Original post on hachyderm.io]

A pink Tiny Tapeout dev board with sky25a with orangey-yellow sky25a breakout board attached. In the Pmod sockets are gamepad, QSPI and VGA Pmods.

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Reposted by Mike Bell

✧✦Catherine✦✧ @whitequark.treehouse.systems.ap.brid.gy · 20/07/2026

the #GlasgowInterfaceExplorer revD project is up on CrowdSupply! subscribe to get updates and show your interested in the project, we're very excited to bring it to life :D www.crowdsupply.com/fully-automated…

crowdsupply.com

Glasgow Interface Explorer revD

The new and improved open source multitool for digital electronics

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Mike Bell @rebelmike.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 30/06/2026

I got a first set of TinyQV chips bonded to boards back from Wafer Space run 1! Time to see if it works 🤞

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Mike Bell @rebelmike.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 12/06/2026

Well it is Friday afternoon, but I just made what I thought was a simple change and Copilot review told me why it was subtly broken. Maybe I should be slightly less Luddite about these things (don’t worry I’m not about to suddenly stop writing code, that’s the bit I enjoy!)

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Mike Bell @rebelmike.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 27/05/2026

Achievement unlocked: raise a bug in Yosys. @mole99 bumped the Yosys version on the wafer.space project template, and now TinyQV doesn't build 😭

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Reposted by Mike Bell

John Mark Ockerbloom @jmarkockerbloom.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 26/05/2026

From the article in the LB: "In ten days last month, the Wikimedia Foundation fired the longtime lead developer of MediaWiki and disbanded the team whose entire job was to listen to volunteers. Most of the people they fired were union organizers. Wikipedia’s editors are now threatening to strike […]

mastodon.social

Original post on mastodon.social

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Reposted by Mike Bell

Roasting House Coffee @roastinghouse.mastodonapp.uk.ap.brid.gy · 25/05/2026

It's #TowelDay. Have a good one and don't forget your #towel

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Mike Bell @rebelmike.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 12/05/2026

I received some silicon from wafer space run 1! These are just for display purposes - we’re still working on getting a board together to allow some to be bonded. But they are a version of my TinyQV SoC in a “quarter size” wafer space slot.

Some small, bare silicon dies in a small portion of a reel, with a 20 euro cent coin below for scale.

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Reposted by Mike Bell

✧✦Catherine✦✧ @whitequark.treehouse.systems.ap.brid.gy · 24/02/2026

huh, this is a really interesting bit of the W25Q64FW datasheet apparently if sufficiently many low bits are 0 (A0 for E7h, A0:3 for E3h) the flash gives you the results faster

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Mike Bell @rebelmike.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 23/02/2026

Interesting to compare CoreMark between RV4028 and TinyQV. RV4028 gets 4.83, it's RV32I running at 15MHz, most instructions take 4 clocks, not much penalty for branches and memory access. TinyQV gets 5.13, it's RV32EC running at 64MHz, most compressed instructions take 8 clocks and […]

hachyderm.io

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Mike Bell @rebelmike.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 23/02/2026

Thank you @tnt for bringing up my TinyQV RISC-V SoC on the most recent #TinyTapeout chips to come back from the fab. These particular IHP chips are funded by the EU, so sadly due to Brexit they can't be shipped to me - but we were able to get Micropython running, and therefore confirm the […]

hachyderm.io

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Mike Bell @rebelmike.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 23/02/2026

Count of RP2 chips currently involved in my "RISC-V" computer project: 4 At least the RP2350 on the IO module is running in RISC-V mode! The others are all RP2040s: - Pico for programming the CPU module FPGA - Pico probe doing UART and SWD to the IO module - Pico in a VGA demo base board being […]

hachyderm.io

Original post on hachyderm.io

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Mike Bell @rebelmike.hachyderm.io.ap.brid.gy · 27/01/2026

A new #introduction for a new server! I can often be found playing with electronics - especially Tiny Tapeout related things and bits and bobs from Pimoroni. I lived on a narrowboat for several years and still enjoy travelling the canals on our boat Rebellion Hobbies include boardgames (both […]

hachyderm.io

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