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printing code examples  Designing Embedded Hardware  Powering Up
Your Home-Brewed Computer  by John Catsoulis, author of
Designing Embedded Hardware  Creating new computer hardware is a
process of precise engineering and design. It involves careful
selection of chips and then a thorough analysis to ensure that
those chips will work (and interact) in the way in which you
intend. Once the design is complete, the first prototype must be
built, and built in a logical (pardon the pun) and systematic
manner, such that any design or construction faults are easily
found.  A virgin computer, the engineering term for such
machines, has a lot of unknowns, and these need to be discovered
step by step. While this process is heavily based on engineering
ground rules, there's an art to doing it effectively. It's an
art that is slowly (and sometimes painfully) learned by the
novice. In this article, I want to s