This will be a bit of an introductory article on memory, written in part for my wife and for anyone else who may find such an introduction useful. In The Beginning… In the beginning there was RAM, random access memory. A microprocessor which could execute instructions would be attached to that RAM, which could be [...]
I forgot how much I hated Windows Mobile.
I just got a DS409+ from Synology. What a perfect little unit for a small business! The upshot of this is that for about $1500 you can have a 6TB RAID-5 box which allows you to run a small local web site (and runs PHP, so you can install a blog or wiki), allows you [...]
While chasing down a usability bug, I discovered something interesting about the hardware for the Google developer phone, which I also suspect plagues the release G1 and G2 phones. The problem is an issue with the touch screen technology used by HTC. The bottom line is this: there is a border to the left and [...]
I just got back my 7 segment LED circuit boards from Pad2Pad, and hooked one up, and connected it to my HC08 for testing. The way this works is that the processor only needs to drive 4 lines: data, shift, load into display and reset. My test software program runs a 16-bit counter (of which [...]
I figured a steampunk calculator would be made using a number of modules that are handcrafted from smaller components–so I just designed a circuit board which can drive 3 7-segment LEDs using a shift register circuit, and ordered 12 of the circuit boards from Pad2Pad. They’re 1.5 inches wide by 2.5 inches tall, and hold [...]
Completed HC08 emulator in Java; will post as soon as I get a chance to validate the code. Also completed a basic 64-bit integer library for the HC08 that fits in about 1.2k. (Multiply and divide use shift/add rather than the HC08 mul and div instructions.) My goal: a basic floating point calculator written for [...]
I remember a time when we used to make things. Duvac in Pasadena used to carry wire wrap supplies and integrated circuits. Fry’s used to have a wide selection of products for making circuits that weren’t contained in packaging that yellowed with age. You could buy Nixie displays from Radio Shack. Perhaps it was a [...]
You know embedded software and embedded microprocessors are everywhere when you find a reference design for an embedded microprocessor system for a vacuum cleaner. They’re using a processor more powerful and faster than the old TRS-80 in order to control the speed of the motor. And why not? The basic design could be reduced to [...]