Category Archives: C

An LED display for Home Assistant Part 2

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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 »

An LED display for Home Assistant Part 1

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 »

An SPI flash and iCE40UP FPGA programmer

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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 »

The beginnings of an LLVM backend

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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 »

Adding a C library to the 68000 SBC

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There are more than a few different choices of C library for running on small systems. Some candidate C libraries for the MINI000 board include: Newlib is an extremely popular choice for small systems. It is relatively complete. Not quite complete enough for a modern desktop Unix system, but almost. It specifically targets bare-bones (AKA freestanding) 68K systems, and allows… Read more »

An analogue joystick and implementing an SPI controller

It’s been a while since my last post. The main reason being a house move. On the plus side this is good for my projects as I now have lots more room to work on them. On the negative side, at least as far as my hobbies are concerned I’ve, somewhat unexpectedly, found myself doing some work for my old company…. Read more »

Exploring C compilers for the 6809

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Ever since I fired up my first 6809-based computer, I have wondered about the possibility of running programs written in something other then assembly language on it. Not that I don’t love writing code in assembly. But for interests sake, and because it could be a different kind of fun, I’ve been curious about running code written in higher level… Read more »