Show HN: BBRouter – Ben Eater's 8-bit computer, simulated on 3D breadboards

54 points - yesterday at 12:10 AM

Hi HN,

I kept wiring Ben Eater's 8-bit computer wrong, so I built a realistic virtual breadboard editor.

Some of the nice features are side-by-side diff, scope, schematics auto-sync, auto-router (BBRouter stands for breadboard router), and my favorites: upload from the real Arduino IDE and connect to your AI with MCP, let Claude & co build it or help you troubleshoot.

The link is the SAP-1 running. You can orbit it, probe a hole with the scope, slow the clock down, play with the virtual displays for debugging, then you can actually build it following the step-by-step instructions.

A side-goal is to create a community, there are quite a lot of simulators out there but mostly offline / too abstract to realistically use it for a real build. I also never found one that had a decent UI/UX and worked well on mobile or with a trackpad.

Happy to answer anything, and tell me what breaks.

p.s. Maker plan is $7/month; code HACKERNEWS makes the first month free and then $5/month for as long as you keep it.

Source

Comments

jhallenworld yesterday at 6:00 PM

This is cool, but seriously I don't understand why you wouldn't just use Verilog (or VHDL) along with the wide number of associated tools available for it. It's trivially simple to create modules for TTL chips. Also you could design the schematic in KiCad and then export the netlist to Verilog for simulation. Verilog has VPI- a method to connect the simulation to external programs (C/C++), from which you could make a GUI for LEDs and switches. Once your design is in Verilog, you could compile it into C++ [Verilator], an FPGA or even an ASIC.

It's like choosing to use LabView for a large programming project (or IMHO, even a small project) instead of something like Python.

ofrzeta today at 7:28 AM

Incidentally I was just thinking about Ben Eater's breadboard setup when I rebuilt a super simple audio circuit (ESP32, MAX98357 ....) from breadboard to a soldered contraption because there was so much noise due to the connectors. Do digital circuits on breadboards not have this problem?

imglorp yesterday at 2:33 AM

How can I hide or move the ram program window? It's blocking the breadboard.

germanrabbit yesterday at 5:59 AM

Congrats on the launch. Have fond memories of early 2k where everything starting with bb was amazing

kinduff yesterday at 3:55 AM

This looks amazing. Congratulations on the launch.

I was hoping to find Ben's Digital breadboard clock [1] in there, I'm currently building it!

[1]: https://eater.net/clock