What is it?

A educational tool for working with and learning assembly language and machine code, and learning a bit about computer architecture at the "bare-metal" level. It fits in your hand, is programmed with a set of push buttons, has an LCD display for examining memory and registers, and even has a built-in dissassembler for showing you the assembly language corresponding to memory contents. This provides a relatively gentle introduction to low-level programming, but is also fun for those already familiar with assembly language and machine code. The board is self-contained -- no way to interface it to anything outside of itself -- but for working with the software (including playing with interrupts!) it's a handy platform :)

Status

Currently waiting on the new set of PCBs, after which I'll be ready to ship. You can follow project updates on the About page.

Documentation

The main website is touchmetal.org The instruction manual is available as a free download.

Why did you make it?

Computer Science is increasingly detached from the low-level aspects of the underlying CPU/memory system. With vibe-coding, this detachment is absolute: you don't even need to understand much about the higher-level aspects of the system. This board is an attempt to help people re-connect with those lower-level aspects. With the Touch Metal board, you examine and modify memory one byte at a time, by typing in addresses and data in octal (using 8 push buttons). After entering your code, you can single-step the CPU, examine registers and memory, and really see what the CPU is doing as it executes your code.

I'm hoping this will be a fun, entertaining and educational toy for people who want to know more about how computers work: a chance to "touch metal."

What makes it special?

This is a custom CPU architecture, designed for education. It has a simple instruction set; relatively few addressing modes (it favors direct memory access, though it also has internal registers and supports memory-indirect addressing); and the coding of instructions in machine code is very clean, breaking on octal-digit boundaries, which makes it feasible to assemble code in your head (especially with the handy assembly-to-machine code map on the back).

Other features:

• It's powered by a USB-C cable (included with every board!)
• It fits in your hand.
• The display is small (but can be made a bit larger to be easier to see).
• It allows you to store 4 programs in non-volatile memory, so you can re-run your favorite programs without having to toggle them in each time.
• The website (touchmetal.org) has various resources available, including an assembler (when you want a break from assembling by hand!), as well as an emulated version (if you suddenly get the urge to do some machine-code programming but forgot your board at home).
• The hardware and software are open-source (will be posted on hackaday.io soon).

Videos

AI Notice

No AI (including auto-correct, grammar suggesting software, AI-assisted search, vibe-coding, AI overviews, etc.) was used in the creation of any aspect of the Touch Metal project. All bugs, mistakes, typos, oversights or "hallucinations" are entirely my own! https://real-i.org

Items are generally shipped within two days of ordering.