core memory – Jussi's electronics projects

Article about the core memory shield

January 10, 2017 by jussi

One of the best things about my core memory shield project has been the wonderful stories and the amazing feedback I have received from you. Mr Wolfgang Robel has even written an article about it. Thanks Wolfgang! Make sure to see his site for a lot of arcade and retro stuff.

Arduino core memory shield is ready and for sale

November 15, 2023April 17, 2016 by jussi

Hi all,

I was selling this core memory shield it as a kit on Tindie between 2016 – 2022 but it is now discontinued. See Andy Geppert’s Core64 project if you’re interested in getting into core memories, or build your own based on the information on this page.

Here is all the material related to the kit:

Complete documentation (including BOM & schematics)
Source code for Arduino program
Gerber files for manufacturing circuit boards
For the old version: (2016/2017 PCB date)
- Complete documentation
- Source codes for Arduino and CPLD

Thanks to Ben North and Oliver Nash at corememoryshield.com for the inspiration and encouragement!

Building a ferrite core memory, part 2

April 30, 2016December 14, 2015 by jussi

My ferrite core memory is progressing nicely. I have received the PCB and assembled it for the most parts.

Core memory shield without sense circuit

This evening I tried out how the H bridges worked – after a few tweaks in the Arduino code I was able to get this sequence out:

ferritecore-2 — Bit read values from an array of cores.

The only remaining things are to assemble the sense line circuit and to do the final testing and tweaking, which will most likely take a long time.

Building a ferrite core memory, part 1

April 30, 2016September 27, 2015 by jussi

A while ago I ordered some ferrite cores from Bulgaria in order to build a vintage memory out of them. Yesterday I managed to build a one-bit memory by following what Wayne has done.

Newfile2 — Writing 1,0,0 to memory which was in state 0. Enable pulses in yellow, sense line in cyan.

Now that I have an understanding of the technology and the characteristics of the cores I have I will continue to build a 32-bit version in the form factor of an Arduino shield (my own twist of this project).