Welcome to my relay computer project

Welcome! I doubt I’ll have many (if any) people reading this blog - it’ll be more for my own record keeping and remembering what I have done and why more than anything else.

Nevertheless I figured I’d start with a little introduction about myself and the project.

My name is Lucas, I’ve been a technology enthusiast my whole life - from the age of 7 or 8 or so I was building little hobbyist electronics circuit kits from Dick Smith Electronics, programming little utilities on the computer from about 12, and built an 8 bit N8VEM single board computer sporting a ZILOG Z80 processor when I was about 15.

After school ran my own IT business doing PC sales and repair as well as some web design. Then went on to work as an audio visual technician working on live events and eventually looking after all the AV infrastructure at a large convention centre.

Cut to the present day and I earn my living programming audio visual systems for an AV integration company - Think PLCs but for controlling things like TVs, cameras, speakers and microphones.

Anyway - on to relay computers… I can’t remember when I came across them - probably around the time I was making the N8VEM SBC, I really liked the idea of going back to computing history before transistors as a learning opportunity, but at that time (and let’s face it, now as well) the cost and time required to build them was fairly prohibitive. I’ve been doing some more reading and research into them over the last few months and have come to the conclusion that it may indeed be possible to build some sort of hybrid version of an early relay machine. Head over to the posts about the Architecture to learn more about the design I’ve been working on.

To sum it up succinctly - I’m planning on making a the core of a 4 bit relay computer (ALU, registers etc) with an interface to digital memory (relays are expensive!) and using a microcontroller to drive a lot of the control logic to reduce the machines footprint and reduce the component count. With the ALU, Registers and all interfacing relays the machine will still have the satisfying “click” to it, but won’t cost an arm and a leg to build, nor will it take years and years to construct which seems to lead to a lot of premature deaths of other relay computer projects I’ve seen online.