My new chips, resonators, and other bits have arrived, and I’ve started wiring it all up. It’s not much to look at, but it’s a cool unit. I bought a handful of 20MHz resonators to use with the new chips. At 4 clocks per instruction, that’s 5 million instructions per second.
Turns out these chips have a thing called a PLL (Phase Locked Loop) inside them, which multiply your clock by 4. The chip is rated up to 48MHz, so with the PLL enabled, and a ‘divide by 5′ in the oscillator settings, I’m running a full 12 million instructions per second.
The sad part is: At this point, all that power is being used to blink a pair of LEDs.
You gotta start somewhere. As I said, it’s not much, but I’ve got the in-circuit programming interface done, so I can leave the chip in place to program it. I also managed not to burn anything while soldering it all into place, which is a new ability.
Hopefully soon it’ll do more than just blink.