PCBs at home with Acidic Copper(II) Chloride

What could possibly go wrong?!

It would be really cool to have my projects on PCBs instead of gigantic messes on my breadboard. The problem is at $99 a board getting them manufactured (in the US) is stupidly expensive. Making them at home looks reasonably cheap. I'd like to be able to do as small as 0603 parts at home, so lets see!

Quick update on LED display

A quick follow up on my last post about the LED message marquee. I've got it working!

Porting MinSoc to the Nexys2, part 2

So in my last post I expressed some frustration in porting the MinSoc to my board. Here I will resolve the issues I mentioned.

Porting MinSoc OpenRISC SoC to the Nexys2

I recently discovered the "MinSoc" project on OpenCores. Its boasts some really impressive features; A fully open source SoC with jtag hardware debugging, wishbone compliant bus, full simulation capabilities, full software toolchains, and a strong community behind it. The default distribution ships with support for a board very similar to mine, so how hard could it be?

LED Message Marquee

I came into possession of an LED message marquee in a state of disassembly. I have two of the modules pictured to the right. I have no idea how they work. In this post I'm going to figure it out!