I love this guy's videos, I've been watching them for a year or so now.
He also made a series [0] where he built the CPU, microcode and all using logic gates and components. As a pure software guy I found it very enlightening.
I have used youtube for a while now. I used to be a 3D artist so I went there every now and then to post my work and to watch other's. After I went back to college, I remember looking at youtube with another eyes, after discovering how many amazing videos were uploading. and for free. Ben was one of them. I remeber seeing him build a entire computer on breadboard and it just blew me away. not only he was building it but explaining everything while doing it. after that I started following some great people in electronics, art, computer science, math... it truly made me a better person / programmer.
I've been told the YouTube algorithm essentially rewards content creators for quantity over quality. Ben Eater seems to only post once a month but every single video is exceptionally high quality.
I've followed his videos from making logic gates with individual components, through making a whole computer with breadboards to the current series of programming a breadboard computer.
Each video is so pared back and well explained. It really dawned on me when he recently started discussing assembly and it just seemed like such a high level language.
I recommend Ben Eater's other videos -- his content is clean, understandable, and kind of meditative introduction to the "meat" of how computers and digital electronics in general work. Kind of like Bob Ross of computer electronics -- you can probably follow along and get a lot of this to work on your own! A good start is the 555 timer tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRlSFm519Bo
He has a very nice series on error detecting codes and cyclic redundancy checks (CRC). The subject is developed very gradually from parity bits and eventually works its way to CRC's and how they are implemented at a hardware level. He also ties everything together in a framework with finite groups pretty neatly.
A little while ago I followed along Ben's tutorial, but using the Visual 6502 website. Took me a bit to figure out how to convert what he was saying into the website's interface, but I learned some more details along the way, so it wasn't a bad thing. I was pretty excited when I got a memory value to change.
What I love about Ben Eater's videos is his incredible patience with these things. I started several projects with arduinos and raspberry pi's and parts are still laying around in a drawer. You spend hours or days physically building something and jumping from that to coding and back. That just annoyed me and eventually tossed all of the components back in the drawer.
First time I've seen this series. A little dry when he was talking about the timing for the memory chips, but what can you say-- this was incredible overall.
He also made a series [0] where he built the CPU, microcode and all using logic gates and components. As a pure software guy I found it very enlightening.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyznrdDSSGM