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Autumn Almanac
Early morning in South Snowdonia 2nd November 2015Part 1 of a series of posts describing open source activities in the Autumn quarter of 2015.This last week I have been travelling my "Autumn Tour"...
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Open Inverter - Part 7 - In search of Sine Waves
In Search of Sine WavesA high quality sine wave, synthesised using an ArduinoThe ability to generate a high quality sinusoidal waveform at a specific frequency,and amplitude is at the heart of the Open...
View ArticleThe Subtle Art of Substitution - Part 1
A simple text interpreter that allows code to be invoked by natural language words. Part 1.Over the weekend and in various bits of spare time I have been developing a tiny text interpreter in C, as...
View ArticleA Minimal Text Interpreter - Part 2
A Text Interpreter to run on a Resource Limited Microcontroller - Part 2In the previous post, I described the basics of a tiny text interpreter, written in C, intended for use on resource limited...
View ArticleMinimal Text Interpreter - Part 3
The operation and main routines of a minimal text interpreter - Part 3This post is merely a description of the first implementation of the text interpreter looking at the principal routines. It's so I...
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A J1 Virtual Machine - Gimme some Jips!
BOB is no slouch when it comes to simulating a virtual stack cpu!Historical Note.Way back in 1991 when I was half the age I am now, I did my pcb design work using OrCAD on a 25MHz 486 desktop. The...
View ArticleBeating the Bloat
Aaaaargh.......!This post is by way of a minor rant about the current state of the tools and methods we use to produce embedded firmware.In order to perform the benchmark tests on the series of...
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NAND to Tetris - A Personal Journey
From NAND to Tetris (N2T) is the popular name for an open study Computing Science course devised by Shimon Schocken and Noam Nisan. It is accompanied by a book, by the same authors "The Elements Of...
View ArticleResults of J1 Simulation
First Up - Some ResultsIn the last post I looked at running the J1 simulator on various platforms from the humble 16MHz Arduino to the red-hot STM32G746 - running at 216MHz. Here are the results of...
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A New Compact Microcontroller Board
The new board shown fitted with a 40 pin DIL Package - eg ATmega1284A Low Cost Generic Microcontroller and FPGA BoardThe Arduino board format is now looking dated with its bulky footprint and only 20...
View ArticleRevelation Time!
Revelation Time!The STM32F7 Discovery board is remarkable a board for the money providing a rich mix of hardware, communication interfaces and memory. With it's 216MHz STM32F746 ARM Cortex M7...
View ArticleExperiments with STM32F7 Discovery
In this post I look at some possible uses for the STM32F7 Discovery board. I look at the possibilities of getting it to generate a video display for an external VGA monitor. I also look at a...
View ArticleThe Frustrations of a Casual C Coder
mbed to the Rescue!Last weekend I had all the frustration of trying to develop code for the STM32F746, and was forced to use Keil' s code size limited IDE, and an unwelcome foray into STM's hardware...
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Colour Coding - Part 1
The 800 x 600 VGA display is partitioned into 16 "Keyholes" or code windowsColour Coding was a quick Sunday afternoon hack to see if there might be a better way of presenting a coding environment to...
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A Little Bit of 1980's Nostalgia
The ever enduring ZX SpectrumAlmost like the real thing!First - a Historical NoteThe first true stored programme computer nicknamed "Baby" was built in Manchester - and first ran code in July 1948.Some...
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Colour Coding - Part II
An early VGA experiment using the FPGA "ZPUino" soft coreLast week I wrote about some ideas to use colour to enhance the coding experience. This week I round-up some of the hardware that makes...
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Revelations II
The ability to see information, code or data, displayed in a graphical manner is one of the most powerful techniques within the whole field of human-machine-interface design. In this post I describe a...
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Learning from the Past
Learning from the PastWe can learn a lot from looking back at computer systems of the past - that were by their very nature much simpler than those we use today, constrained by memory and the cost of...
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The J1b Forth CPU - on a Papilio Duo
The Papilio Duo - A Spartan 6 FPGA board with 2MB SRAMToday, for the first time, I have a working softcore processor running in a FPGA on the Papilio Duo board. It's a J1b Forth cpu which is a 32 bit,...
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Colour Coding - Part III
This is the first of my 5050 boards - that has gone to meet it's makers....As Frankie Howerd used to say....The PrologueIn the last week, I have designed a compact VGA generation pcb - which will...
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