USB Action
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.…
Category BMOW 1
The original BMOW: a custom-designed, hand-built 8-bit CPU and computer.
Validation Test
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,…
RAM Test
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…
More Hardware Woes
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…
Hardware Glitches
Just after I wrote last week’s entry, the hardware went from proudly proclaiming “BMOW is alive!” to merely stating “BMOW is aliv”. I was able to track this down to a problem with the program counter chip. Often, but not…
BMOW Is Alive!
Everything seems to be falling into place now. I think a picture says it best: The LCD is up and running, displaying messages from the ROM program. I wasn’t lucky enough to have it work on the first try this…
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