The RamWall...

[Grant Stockly]

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Subject: Wall of RAM
Date: 1 Jan 2006 19:25:50 -0800
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A while back on ebay I was just looking around and came upon 50,000
LEDs.

Ebay is a dangerous place, I can understand how women go to the store
and spend $800 window shoping.

$300 later and I have 50,000 LEDs in the mail

Anyway, I gave away around 1,500 to friends. I still have MANY of them
left.

I thought a "fun" project would be to create a "Wall of RAM". Now it
would be fairly easy to emulate the ram and display the results on the
wall using a CPLD, but what about actually making real ram?

Does anyone think its possible to use capacitors and high current
drivers to use the LED+capacitor combination as ram?

The goal of the project would be a wall of cards, say 4k of ram max.
This wall of ram would interface to either the Altair that I bought OR
the Apple 1 kit that I bought on ebay.

What do you guys think? It seems that with some RAS/CAS decoding logic
that it shouldn't be too hard. The cons of this project are the cost
of 4,096 capacitors and PCBs. The pros of the project are, well, it
would look really neat.

Tell me what you think.

Grant