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Show HN: I made a little digital circuit simulator that operates on PNGs

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Re: Show HN: I made a little digital circuit simulator that operates on PNGs

#23

We’re also working on something like this, but we’re making a game around it https://charperbonaroo.github.io/bls/#0

Very nice!

FWIW, I can't figure what to do on the "ride the line" level. I don't understand what the motors do exactly (powering both motors simultaneously makes the car go sideways) and what the sensors are sensing.

Re: Show HN: I made a little digital circuit simulator that operates on PNGs

#27
post #10

As a complete layman I wonder if there’s a future where you could use a picture/X-ray of an old CPU architecture and simulate it blindly with an approach similar to yours?

"Blindly" is a stretch but people have built transistor level simulations of old chips from photographs. Check out the delightful Visual 6502 if you've never seen it before:

In the summer of 2009, working from a single 6502, we exposed the silicon die, photographed its surface at high resolution and also photographed its substrate. Using these two highly detailed aligned photographs, we created vector polygon models of each of the chip's physical components - about 20,000 of them in total for the 6502. These components form circuits in a few simple ways according to how they contact each other, so by intersecting our polygons, we were able to create a complete digital model and transistor-level simulation of the chip.

This model is very accurate and can run classic 6502 programs, including Atari games. By rendering our polygons with colors corresponding to their 'high' or 'low' logic state, we can show, visually, exactly how the chip operates: how it reads data and instructions from memory, how its registers and internal busses operate, and how toggling a single input pin (the 'clock') on and off drives the entire chip to step through a program and get things done.

http://www.visual6502.org/

Re: Show HN: I made a little digital circuit simulator that operates on PNGs

#28
post #17

Brilliant idea! That logo however is the most repulsive piece of artwork I've seen in a long time. (I am sorry for being blunt)

The project is super cool but I agree the logo is a terrible example of it in use. I'd love to see a more easy to digest example. The logo circuit is confusing and I'm not sure what to make of it.

I have some small examples in a blogpost about it: https://lynndotpy.xyz/posts/reso_intro.html

It shows the four basic logic gates, a one-bit adder, and simple digital clocks. I'll add these to the git repo in a bit!

Re: Show HN: I made a little digital circuit simulator that operates on PNGs

#30

We’re also working on something like this, but we’re making a game around it https://charperbonaroo.github.io/bls/#0

That's incredible. It was just "very cool" for the first few levels - if you cleaned up the directions and added a factorio-style blueprint library I could easily see myself sitting down to work out optimal solutions to any level you put out, like I did with Codex of Alchemical Engineering - but the last level put it on a whole new level. This is everything that's good about HS electronics classes where you get to make line-following robots but without any of the real-world annoyances. Massively streamlined. Get enough content in this interface and I bet you could sell a lesson plan to every school district in the United States.
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