Sprout24 CPU

Sprout24 is a "know-your-roots" computer processor — designed and built from the ground up as a teaching tool to help introduce the basics of computer science and demystify how computers work.

We've heard that computers work entirely in ones and zeroes... but what does that even mean? How is that really enough to let modern computers, phones, and devices do all the amazing things that they can?

Let's take a look together at how that all works, using the design of the Sprout24 along the way to illustrate how simple pieces working together like an orchestra can make beautiful things possible.

Development is currently underway, having just reached a big milestone with the assembly and start of testing of the first complete CPU. A more complete public project launch is expected later in 2023, with plans to present it at Penguicon 2024. I'm looking forward to sharing more with you!

~ Autumn

April 5, 2023 — She's now officially been powered on and executed her first code. I'm so excited for this!

I did find a design oops on the carry-lookahead adder that increments the program counter, so it goes haywire after counting to 256, but I think I will be able to bodge that to be able to finish testing.

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April 4, 2023 — All boards are tested as well as they can be individually. Tonight I assembled all the boards together, and she's beautiful. I'll be powering the whole thing up and starting to test it in the coming days.

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April 1, 2023 — Assembled ALU and Register 01 boards are complete and match emulator in testing. Register File and Control Unit are complete and pass spot-check testing.

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March 30, 2023 — The order is in, and all 25 boards that make up the CPU are ready to test and assemble!

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March 8, 2023 — Placed order for all remaining CPU boards, including the Southeast and East Bridge boards. Now we wait.

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March 3, 2023 — My bank flagged the PCB order as suspicious, so I had to call them to confirm it was legit. In the meantime I noticed an omission in the Register File board, so I put the order on hold and made a revision B for the Register File and West Bridge boards. At this point, I'm close enough on the layout of the Southeast board that I'm going to wait to try the order again until I can include the Southeast and East Bridge boards too.

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February 28, 2023 — The Register File, Register 01, Northwest, and West Bridge board designs are now finished, and I just placed an order for those plus the Control Unit and ALU Core boards. There will be a lot of things to test once this order shows up.

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February 1, 2023 — The Control Unit and ALU Core boards are ready to order, though I'm going to wait until I have a couple others ready to save on shipping costs.

Next to design are the "Northwest" board that includes components related to the program counter and stack pointer, and the "Southeast" board that relates to the instruction and status registers.

And I now have a tentative physical layout for how the individual boards will fit together into a complete CPU. Two additional helper boards with no components will sit below the rest of the boards for physical support and for routing busses between the boards above.

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December 22, 2022 — The CPU's Control Unit is working and tested in the emulator, and now it's time to turn it into hardware. More details and a demo in this video.

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November 22, 2021 — Ordered ALU Adder, ALU Logic, ALU Shifter, ShiftBusRead, ShiftBusWrite

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October 2, 2021 — Ordered Register rev.B

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March 1, 2020 — Ordered Register

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February 5, 2020 — First KiCAD PCB sketch — for register board

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September 27, 2019 — More design goals and ideas; sketches of board layouts

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September 25, 2019 — Start of project notebook: description, what, why, first sketches of opcodes and isa, instruction encoding, register tower.