Makevention 2015

Makevention went really well! I was able to show everything I have been working on, although I didn't have time to finish everything. I made a poster board explaining some concepts related to calculators like RPN, BCD, and CORDIC on the left side with information about my RPN Scientific Calculator on the right. I also had a print out of how my external RAM preprocessor works. A few of the people who came by my table were programmers and understood the solution.

On the table itself I had different calculators and projects laid out in roughly chronological order. The first was an MK-61 RPN calculator I added to my collection over 10 years ago. Of course I didn't make it but I wanted to show an example of an RPN calculator and what inspired me to first make calculators. When I first got the calculator out to test it, it didn't show anything on the screen and I was afraid it was broken. I took it completely apart and looked for burst capacitors. I also brushed off the battery contacts since they didn't look very clean. When I turned it on, it still didn't show anything but when I pressed a number it showed up! It seems the calculator just doesn't display anything when first turned on, instead of the zero I was expecting. Somehow I had forgotten that in the 10 years its been since I last used it.

The Casio Algebra FX 2.0 was included to show the RPN stack program I wrote for it in 2002 or so. That program was designed to make the calculator function more like the HP-48GX I had at the time which I admired so much. First, I had to buy a calculator to replace the Algebra FX 2.0+ I sold in college. Loading the program onto the calculator took quite a while to figure out! In 2002 I used a serial cable, which I think was an SB-87, to load programs without any trouble. Nowadays I don't have a serial port, so I bought an FA-124 USB cable. It turns out that this cable doesn't work on Windows 7. I also couldn't get it to work correctly under Windows XP running in an emulator. Next I tried a lot of different third-party software and finally got the program to load using FlashCOM 1.4v and an FTDI cable. For the link port I bought a 2.5mm plug that I could easily wire to the FTDI cable. After that, the program I loaded kept crashing and I thought the transfer was corrupt. After more fiddling I got Turbo C up and running in an emulator and compiled the program source myself, which produced a fairly stable program that was good enough for exhibiting, although it did crash a couple times during Makevention. Someday I would like to fix the program up and make it more stable.

The next thing I showed was a launchpad hooked up to a breadboard with a button and blinking LED to show how easy it is to get started with electronics. The next step was my binary LED calculator. I soldered a coin battery holder on to the board. After that I showed the RPN Scientific Calculator and explained that it was not too difficult to move to this stage after I managed to finish the binary LED calculator. The Programmable RPN Scientific Calculator was next. I printed temporary a colored keypad on poster paper which I taped to it, but it did not work very well. Unexpectedly, the calculator showed random keypresses when I put my hand near it. All the keys were in the same column on the keyboard, which makes me thing there is a bad connection in that row of the key matrix.

Next I showed the Improved 6502 Virtual Trainer up and running on my laptop, along with the first 6502 Virtual Trainer. I also showed what I had accomplished with the 6502 graphing calculator. So far, I have most of the hardware for it installed but I am having problems keeping the buffer chips for driving the LCD at the appropriate voltage level. Maybe the pins joining the sections of the calculator together aren't making a good connection. In any case, I showed the calculator taken apart into its sections. I also showed the Logic Tool I have been using to debug the graphing calculator and the EEPROM programmer I built. The last thing I showed was the TI-86 I bought to hook up to an ESP8266. My plan was to relay text from the calculator over WiFi to a computer running Matlab or similar software to allow the calculator to solve more complex equations. I still haven't gotten the ESP8266 voltage levels to work right, but I want to finish this project when I have time.

All in all it was a great day and I really enjoyed showing the public all the things I have been working
on.

6502 Virtual Trainer: Calculator Program

After I got my new Hakko FX-888, the first thing I did was solder the trainer to perfboard. It took some time to get used to the new iron but the board turned out well:

The FT232 cable connects to a few header pins soldered to a piece of perfboard connected perpendicularly to the main board by more pins that are bent at an angle. They make header pins at an angle but I used the last of mine on the board I made for programming the Z16F. There was also room to add some sockets and pins that can be used to program the MSP430, as well as power and status LEDs.

After using the board for about a week I had a strange error where the chip jumped to address 8080 on reset instead of 8000 which is stored at the reset vector. After some investigating, it seems there was a short between the Vcc pin of the IO expander and the pin controlling A7 of the 6502's address bus. On the back side of the board there was clearly no bridge which had me stumped but it worked fine after scraping away some of the flux between the joints. The problem reappeared after a week or two but was fixed again by cleaning the space between the joints. In frustration I ordered a W65C02 thinking the chip might have been damaged due to some acidental bus contention that had happened during testing. It seems that the pinout is a little different from the W65C816 I am using but it will still be useful because I plan to use it for an improved version of the trainer.

With the software I have made a little progress as well. The PC software skips sending any uninitialized memory and with a few other tweaks can program the whole 64KB memory in less than 3 seconds, down from 6 seconds. The microcontroller firmware is also a little better. Compiling with the -o3 flag in GCC brings average cycles per second up to about 16,000 from 12,000. However, setting the update rate to 100ms from 200ms to make typing more comfortable brings it back to around 14,000.

To learn 6502 assembly I decided to make a little test calculator program. It has turned out to be a really good way to get to know the chip, even though it has taken a lot longer than I expected. Below is a screenshot.

On the left is a text window for the 4-function RPN stack. It has 10 levels and each element is 8 bytes of packed BCD. This is convenient because the 6502 has a BCD mode. On the right is a window to enter formulas which can be graphed, like the first three, or repeated like the Celsius and Fahrenheit conversions. Formulas and graph colors can be selected with the dip switches. The toggle switch at the bottom selects between the two text windows and an LED above each window shows which one is selected. All of this could be done with a keyboard interface but I wanted to show off some of the peripherals that can be used. There is also a timer peripheral ticking every 500ms that the program reads to draw a flashing cursor in whichever of the two input text windows is active. The last peripheral is a multiplication ROM that works when single stepping the processor but not when running from SRAM yet.

There are still several improvements to be made to the trainer but I am done working on it for the moment. My plan is to port the code I have to an STM32 which will be much faster and also be able to store all 64KB of the 6502 address space in its internal RAM.

6502 Virtual Trainer: Update

Lately I have been working on several different projects and I have made a lot of progress on the 6502 Virtual Trainer. The first step was connecting the PC interface to an MSP430 over UART. This was easy because I have done it in other projects. Microchip let me sample some MCP23S17 IO expanders and I was really excited to be able to try them out to read and write the pins of the 6502. Unfortunately, they were a little finicky to get going because the datasheet incorrectly lists the reset pin as an output instead of an input.  They do save a lot of space, though, because five shift registers would be needed to replace them. After that was solved, I was able to single-step the processor as I intended but only at about 90 cycles per second. For comparison's sake, with the processor doing nothing else, that is a little too slow to type comfortably. At the beginning I knew this would be slow but that is much slower than I expected. The bottleneck seems to be the USB<->serial layer since the program sends lots of small packets of data instead of small numbers of large packets. To speed this up, I send 10 bytes of op codes every packet. Then the MSP430 can use the data sent if it needs to read a byte that is near. It will have to request more data if a jump takes place or data is read from another location in memory but in general this improvement led to a speed up of about 150 cycles per second. This was still not as fast as I had hoped for so I decided to keep a copy of all of the memory on an SPI SRAM chip. For this I used a 23LC1024, also from Microchip, which holds 128k. Using an SPI SRAM might seem to make less sense than just hooking up a typical parallel SRAM but by letting the microcontroller control the memory I can hold extra information about the data such as which bytes have not been initialized and which should be ROM. This will let me break when reads and writes that would be illegal are performed. Even during testing this turned out to be useful as it is easy for a beginner to assembly to write something like LDX $FF instead of LDX #$FF. As a compromise the MSP430 runs the 6502 as fast as possible then pauses and updates the PC every 200ms or when 64 bytes of memory have been modified, whichever comes first. Another way to speed things up was to increase the COM port speed from the 230,400 bps max of the MSComm control I'm using with Visual Basic 6 to 1,000,000 bps. At 1,200,000 bps the MSP430 could not keep up running the 6502 and reading data. With these changes I can run the 6502 at about 12,000 cycles per second. This is still pretty slow but fast enough to play with for learning purposes. To test things I made a few programs including one that draws a faded red pattern like below:

New Project: 6502 Virtual Trainer

One project I have been interested in for a while is building a homebrew computer. Some of the projects I have followed like Veronica are really fascinating and I would like to do something similar. For my project I decided to use an M68000 but Mouser did not have any in DIP packages when I ordered from them last year so I settled on a W65C816S instead. This chip is compatible with the 6502 like Veronica uses but also has a 16-bit mode which is more powerful. Other homebrew computers like this one use that chip as well.

KIM-1 6502 trainer

Setting up RAM and ROM to work with the processor for a simple system is well-documented. My first idea was to hook up a microcontroller to the system once I had it running to monitor the bus and some of the control pins not usually used in simple systems. That way I could transfer information about the system to a PC over UART and even control the clock rate. Then I realized that it would be simpler to skip the RAM and ROM altogether and keep all of the memory on the PC. The microcontroller would relay data between the processor and the emulated memory and peripherals. This would not be a useful system by itself but it would let me learn a lot about how the processor works.

Simple systems like the KIM-1 were produced in the past along the same lines. These were called trainers and often had simple hardware that let people learn about how computers work. I decided to call my project a trainer also. My plan is to control the processor through an interface on the PC that will let me examine the memory as the program is running as well as set break points and single-step the processor. It will also show me the status of all the control pins and let me set the values of some of them. Peripherals like buttons, lights, and displays will all be virtual. Here are some of the ones I have working so far: