2022 was another year full of all kinds of fun projects like my 7400 Logic Calculator plan, Interactive 6502 Assembler, and embedded programming on Linux. Although these weren't on my list of 2022 Project Goals list, I did learn a lot from them and make progress towards some of the goals on the list. With 2022 coming to a close, it's time to take stock of my progress from 2022 and set some goals for 2023.
2022 Project Goals
6507 Graphing Calculator - Still working
Despite another year of work on this project, there is still a lot of work left to finish it. The plan to reduce the firmware size to fit into an 8K ROM by using a Forth VM didn't work out as expected. After a little more work, I plan to post about my progress on this from 2022 and how the project will proceed in the future.
PIC32 Blinky Robot - Done!
This is the one project from the list that is completely finished. It even made it onto Hackaday yesterday! As mentioned in the article, what I learned from this project will be useful for other projects like the PIC32 Calculator below.
Tiny Calculator - No progress
Not much to say here. There just wasn't enough time to get to this one.
Not much to say here. There just wasn't enough time to get to this one.
PIC32 Calculator - Still working
Although I haven't started on this project formally yet, a lot of my projects from 2022 will help me work on this one. As mentioned in the last project goals post, this shouldn't take as long as other calculators since it won't be necessary to write all the firmware from scratch.
2023 Project Goals
This year, my goal is to finish enough projects to give a presentation at the Hewlett-Packard Handheld Conference (HHC) in fall 2023 like my presentations at HHC 2019 and HHC 2021. This will take a lot of focus which I wasn't able to pull off last year. Hopefully, having a firm date and goal in mind will motivate me. Here is the tentative list of topics:
Although not a calculator, this should be really interesting to present on since the 6502 emulator written in MIPS assembly can be used to emulate 6502 calculator firmware on a PIC32. This is a good one to start with since this project is already finished.
As mentioned above, there is still a lot of work left to do for this though I know exactly how to proceed from here. Barring any unforeseen complications, this should be a straightforward project to finish. This will be one of the main topics of the presentation.
Calculator key comparison
This is another topic where I made a lot of progress in the last year but haven't posted anything yet. My goal is to compare many different ways of making calculator keys using 3D printing, laser cutting, cast plastic and other methods.
PIC32 Calculator
This is the same project from my list last year. This will be the most exciting thing to present on if it's ready in time.
