Suggestion: A two-bit LED and a six-bit readout

[brentl]

What a brilliant program. Thank you so much for sharing it with us.

Of course, when you love something, all kinds of ideas come up for "improvements". Here are my first two (groan):

1. A three-colours plus off variant of the LED, with either a two-bit input or two separate 1-bit inputs. 00 = Off; 01 = Red, 11 = Green, 10 = Yellow (maybe - the exact assignment is not important).

2. A simpler, ready-made segmented readout, with 4-bit input which is decoded internally, a 1-bit input for the dot, and a 1-bit input for "display off" (probably inverted). Now, I know I could build my own, but it would be nice to be able to have one that only takes up the space of the readout itself, without any additional "bare" circuitry.

I hope you'll interpret all these additional demands as a sign of how well-liked LogicCircuit is. And, of course, I'll understand if you don't want to implement them, for whatever reason.

[admin]

Thank you very much for your words of support and suggestions.
Yes the multicolor LED and even a LED matrix is on my TODO list. So in one of the future versions it should be implemented.
As for the readout I am not sure. If you just need a simple way to display sate of your circuit for debugging or monitoring purposes you can easily use probes. I am not sure this program needs any "smart" circuits to be built in as its main purpose educational - so anyone can see how things work instead of just use some "magic" circuits.

[brentl]

Yes, that's a valid criticism of my idea.

However, I would venture to argue in its favour along these lines: when you have a major project in hand (like, say, building an IBM System/360), it can be very useful to tap an occasional 8-bit hex display into your bus to see what's going on. But it's nice (a) if it doesn't take up too much space and (b) if you don't have to cut-and-paste a complete assembly. It would be possible to build a circuit (similar to the Clock's "4 to 7") to do most of what's needed, but it's the last bit of wiring-up the circuit to the display that kills it.

That said, I recognise that you're the absolute boss, and nothing I say here is in any way meant to detract from your work.

[admin]

I see you point. So for now please use probe – it’s exactly what you need. Meanwhile I’ll think maybe there is a solution that may satisfy our both demands.
Oh, and if you manage to build anything like IBM 360 please share it here with other folks.

[Nova Robberson]

It's a 4 by 4 array of LEDs!The LEDs are controlled by the LED chip, which takes an Row input and Y coordinate and activates the corresponding LEDs.
The Y coordinate and Row input are pre-programmed with the ROM chips. The ROM for rows is the top one, the ROM for Y is the bottom one.