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What’s the coolest ‘just for the joy of engineering’ project you’ve ever made, and how did you pull it off? We are asking e14 in our Join, Share & Win Competition

E14Alice

Hello May! 

A new month means a new AskE14. Engineers, makers, and problem‑solvers are always building things simply because it’s fun to see what’s possible. Whether it’s a weekend experiment, a clever hack, or a wildly over‑engineered passion project, those moments capture the pure joy of creating.

Time for the question 

What’s the coolest “just for the joy of engineering” project you’ve ever made, and how did you pull it off?

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Competition Details 

You'll have to be a member of the element14 Community to join in and take part in this “Join, Share & Win” challenge. It's simple, all you have to do is:

1. You need to make sure you are Register or Login
2. Then answer the following question by adding a reply or commenting!

What’s the coolest ‘just for the joy of engineering’ project you’ve ever made, and how did you pull it off?

This month, we are giving away:

The Community team will then select the best 3 answers to win the UNO R4 Minima! 

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Closing date: 29th May

Winners announced week of: Today

UNO R4 Minima


Winners!

Please join me in congratulating the winners:

 

 

 

Please make sure your address is updated on the Community Account! 


Terms and Conditions 

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Edit: Winners are being reviewed, due to a change in the element14 Community team there'll be a slight delay.

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  • A few years ago I designed a fantasy processor (i.e: An architecture that doesn't exist), and implemented a virtual machine on Arduino (so the Arduino would "emulate" this processor together with some hardware like a screen, an SD card for storage and an external memory) and also wrote a PC emulator and debugger for development together with my own assembler/linker for writing code for this machine, and I was working on a C compiler for it when I started struggling to find time (and motivation) more and more, and eventually abandoned it.

    The instruction set was capable enough to implement various math algorithms (I tried the typical recursion tests, factorial, etc) as well as handling moving memory fast enough to do graphics and basic effects like scrolling.

    Here's a video of a demo I wrote for that machine showcasing scrolling graphics, running on my emulator/debugger:

    Video of the same demo running on a physical implementation of the processor and bare-bones hardware:

    This was definitely a case of an over-engineered project. But I wanted to see if I was able to design a minimalist yet feature-full instruction set that could result in a relatively fast execution and minimal code size, even when implemented on slow devices with little to no RAM. This would allow me to, for example, create projects that I could port instantaneously to different dev boards, and that it could be run sandboxed and loaded from external devices. This could have even been the foundations for creating a minimal multi-platform Operating system for embedded microcontrollers, able to load programs from disk or external media, and multitask between programs even in devices that do not allow for code to be loaded from outside their program memory.

    The instruction set went through several iterations before I was happy with it and started building tools (like the assembler and the debugger) that could test its implementation so I worked on this for over a year (although there were months were little to no progress was made because I had little to no time for it).

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  • A few years ago I designed a fantasy processor (i.e: An architecture that doesn't exist), and implemented a virtual machine on Arduino (so the Arduino would "emulate" this processor together with some hardware like a screen, an SD card for storage and an external memory) and also wrote a PC emulator and debugger for development together with my own assembler/linker for writing code for this machine, and I was working on a C compiler for it when I started struggling to find time (and motivation) more and more, and eventually abandoned it.

    The instruction set was capable enough to implement various math algorithms (I tried the typical recursion tests, factorial, etc) as well as handling moving memory fast enough to do graphics and basic effects like scrolling.

    Here's a video of a demo I wrote for that machine showcasing scrolling graphics, running on my emulator/debugger:

    Video of the same demo running on a physical implementation of the processor and bare-bones hardware:

    This was definitely a case of an over-engineered project. But I wanted to see if I was able to design a minimalist yet feature-full instruction set that could result in a relatively fast execution and minimal code size, even when implemented on slow devices with little to no RAM. This would allow me to, for example, create projects that I could port instantaneously to different dev boards, and that it could be run sandboxed and loaded from external devices. This could have even been the foundations for creating a minimal multi-platform Operating system for embedded microcontrollers, able to load programs from disk or external media, and multitask between programs even in devices that do not allow for code to be loaded from outside their program memory.

    The instruction set went through several iterations before I was happy with it and started building tools (like the assembler and the debugger) that could test its implementation so I worked on this for over a year (although there were months were little to no progress was made because I had little to no time for it).

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