Month June 2008

palette diagram

Notes on Video

The high-level design of the BMOW video system is mostly complete now, but is scattered across eight pages of scrawled notes and the inside of my head. It’s proving to be a complex beast, and there are still many smaller…

video test circuit

Video Tests

My loftiest of stretch goals for BMOW is to build a primitive video circuit, and connect the machine to a standard VGA monitor. To that end, I did some prototyping experiments on a breadboard recently to experiment with video generation.…

multitasking demo shot

Multitasking Success

After a LOT of fiddling, I finally pulled off a successful multitasking demo. It’s not the most exciting thing in the world to watch, but once you understand what’s happening, you’ll appreciate the nerd factor. The photo below shows BMOW…

Robo-Flower

Robo-Flower

I recently took a break from BMOW’s multi-tasking support to work on something completely different. (Actually, I have a multi-tasking demo working in the simultator, but it doesn’t work on the real hardware yet.) The “something different” was a robo-flower:…

User Mode Programs

I made a little progress this week on separating what I hope will eventually become the operating system software from everything else. Up until now, all the test programs I’ve written have essentially been the operating system, or part of…