Though I haven't made many posts in the past two years, I have been working on projects slowly but surely. As time passes, I realize how important it is to focus on a small number of projects so that some of them eventually get finished. For 2022, I'd like to pick exactly which projects I want to finish. Hopefully this will motivate me and help me focus!
Main projects
6507 Graphing Calculator
This project is still going after 18 months of work. While I haven't made any progress on implementing the new firmware features I mentioned in my last post on this, I have been working a lot on a subproject for verifying the calculator's floating point routines. Like many projects, this took a lot more time than I expected. Hopefully, I'll be done with this subproject soon so I can post about it. I've also been working on a way to make nice plastic keys for the calculator.
PIC32 Robot
This is an idea I've had for a long time for a simple "robot" built using a PIC32 microcontroller. It's a really interesting project that shouldn't take nearly as long as the calculator projects. It will be a good opportunity to get familiar with PIC32s which I want to use for a future calculator project. Hopefully, I can devote a little bit of time to this and still have time to finish or at least make good progress on the 6507 Graphing Calculator this year.
Other projects
Tiny Calculator
Since the 6507 competition began in 2020, I stopped working on this calculator. In the unlikely event that I finish the 6507 calculator this year, I'd like to return to this project and make some major changes. First, the floating point routines need to be redone using proper guard, round, and sticky like I learned how to do for the 6507 calculator. The existing Tiny Calculator firmware doesn't round in a conformant way and instead uses 32 decimal places to try to mitigate the rounding errors. Also, the routines use 9's complement as TI shows in their documentation for BCD subtraction. It became clear after writing most of the firmware that this wasn't the right way to go, but I didn't have the heart to rewrite everything. My plan now is to take as much as I can of the existing firmware and write a library of BCD floating point functions that use 10's complement with 12 decimal places and proper rounding then call those functions from C to rewrite the Tiny Calculator firmware. I'd also like to find a better solution for the keys and case.
PIC32 Calculator
This is another project I have thought about for a long time. This should be much simpler to tackle than my other calculator projects since I won't be writing the firmware from scratch. If I'm able to finish my two main projects this year, this is another one I'd like to start working on.
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