The initial target for my iCE40UP devboard was and is a softcore processor design. I’ve worked on two softcores in the past: A 16 bit core implemented in VHDL: this core features 8 by 16 bit registers, a 16 bit external design (that is, external 16 bit address and data busses), and a fairly complete set of ALU operations. It’s… Read more »
You should read Part 1 and Part 2 of this series if you haven’t already. A problem with the HUB75 display reared it’s head almost as soon as I started playing about with MQTT: occasionally the screen would flicker, only slightly, but just enough to be noticed. At this stage I was driving the HUB75 pins with my own RP2040… Read more »
The integration of my display with Home Assistant was prompted by my experiences with Tasmota, an alternate firmware for off the shelf ESP8266 and ESP32 -based devices. Essentially it allows the manufacturer supplied firmware for everything from lightbulbs to curtain motors to be replaced with an open source equivalent, often with Tasmota providing additional functionality on top of what the… Read more »
I’ve been working on this particular project for about nine months now, on and off. It’s finally at a point where I consider it complete, though there is still room for improvement and further ideas. Because I’ve been working on this for so long without documenting it here, this post is going to have to be spread over two posts… Read more »
Before designing my iCE40UP development board, I knew I would need some kind of programmer for the SPI flash memory that would hold the design it ran. I’d already discounted the idea of using an off-the-shelf programmer: it would add more cost to the project, and it was a far too “easy” solution. Therefore I was going to build my… Read more »
As a brief interlude, and before getting back to FPGAs, I wanted to document something I consider to be tremendously important: the restoration of my beloved Amiga 1200. I own two of these machines: the original one I bought in the summer of 1993 just before starting university, and a “spare” I bought off eBay about 10 years ago. As… Read more »
It’s been another nine months since the last post. I will not dwell on the reasons for the lack of updates, except to say I have been busy with my projects; I just haven’t had the enthusiasm to post here until now. However the next post will go over some smaller projects I’ve completed recently, but this post is dedicated… Read more »
It’s been eight months since I last wrote in this blog. To my regular readers, should I happen to have any, I’m really sorry about that. The main reason for the large gap is I had a full time job and therefore had a massively reduced amount of free time. I say had because it’s no longer the case for… Read more »
I’ve been very busy for the last few months, with many different things. This post will therefore be a bit of a mess, unfortunately. I’m at a place where I’ve been before a few times: not knowing the most interesting road to explore, since there are so many, and they are all fascinating and rewarding in their own way. First… Read more »
As mentioned at the bottom of the previous post, I’ve been designing a new 32 bit processor, and this post is concerned with the design of that processor’s Instruction Set Architecture. The objectives for this project are as follows: To learn as much as possible from the experience To leverage what I learned making my previous 16 bit processor To… Read more »