The keyboard hardware interface works! I’m now a happy key-tapping fool, because with its own keyboard and LCD display, BMOW can operate completely independently from any host PC. The 4×20 LCD is certainly a very cramped workspace, so a Hyperterminal…
I’m sort of at a crossroads now, with the basic hardware working, and I need to decide what to do next. There’s still some remaining hardware work, of course: the keyboard and real-time clock, but neither of those is essential.…
BMOW is now USB-enabled for PC communication, for both reads and writes. Yahoo! I wrote a simple program to log when the USB interface goes up and down, and to echo all bytes received from the PC to BMOW’s LCD.…
Remember that validation test suite I wrote last December? Back then, I ran it using a Verilog hardware simulation of BMOW, and it exercised every variant of every machine instruction: adds, jumps, xors, loads, stores, branches taken, branches not taken,…
Egads! The RAM works. This thing is starting to look like a real computer now. I wrote an improved version of my fibonacci program that operates on 16-bit values, using 4 bytes of RAM as temporary storage. I then created…
After my earlier hardware glitches were seemingly resolved, I added the RAM to BMOW, which is the last of the basic hardware components needed. Unfortunately, this created a huge new set of hardware problems that I can only describe as…
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