Nibbler PCB Build
William Buchholz has designed and built a PCB version of my Nibbler 4-bit CPU for his local hackerspace. Nibbler is built entirely from standard 7400 series logic chips – individual counters, registers, buffers, and gates. It’s an educational example of a simple CPU that’s easy to understand and build, but still capable of running games and other interesting programs.
In addition to converting my messy wire-wrap job into an elegant PCB, William also made some component substitutions, including a larger program ROM. Using jumpers connected to the upper 5 address lines, you can select between several different programs without having to reprogram the ROM. More photos of William’s work are here and the schematics and design files are here.
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Unfortunately the Tindie link does not work.
https://www.tindie.com/products/wmbuchholz/nibbler-4-bit-homebrew-cpu-pcb.
I realise this is not part of Steve’s site, but I could find no-where else to make this comment.
Smartin…
awesome thanks for offering this pcb.
I enjoyed bulding the Nibbler on the breadboard so much that I decided to also do the PCB version.
The board is very nice and it only took a couple of hours to solder. I turned it on and it works!
There are small changes in the board compared to the original design so I had to buy a few extra ICs.
Thank you Steve and William.
I decided to build an enclosure for this as part of learning how to use a laser cutter and 3D printer. The results can be found here:
http://imgur.com/a/EoxX9
I have also moved all the design files over to GitHub:
https://github.com/pong74ls/Nibbler