The past few months I have not had enough time to update this blog because I had so much to do in school this semester. My laptop also stopped working properly and I haven't had time to fix it, so I have not done anything with my projects. The only thing I have done related to programming is a few problems on Project Euler, which I recommend to anyone who enjoys programming. In August, a lot of things happened leading up to Makevention. Now that I have some time during the holidays, I am going to try to catch up on some posts. Hopefully I will have more time this semester to work on projects.
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
Wednesday, August 12, 2015
New Project: Logic Tool
Since my plan to make a wireless breadboard did not work out, I decided to use the MCP23S17 shift registers I bought for it to make something similar. It is similar to a logic analyzer but shows information in real time rather than recording a short period of time at high resolution. It has female headers for 64 pins but so far I have only soldered 32 of them in. As time gets closer to Makevention, I'm trying to save time however I can to get my last few projects working.With 64 pins I will have enough to monitor all of the lines of my 6502 project. Unlike a logic analyzer, I can
In the end I think this project will work out better than the plan I had for the Wireless Breadboard. When I tried the breadboard I was going to use with another project, it showed a big voltage drop across the rails. I did not know this could happen and it would have been unfortunate to build the whole project and then find out the board was not very good.
Tuesday, August 11, 2015
New Project: 6502 Graphing Calculator
One of the last things I want to make progress on before Makevention in a few weeks is a graphing calculator I have been planning for quite a while. It will use a 65C02 and is the main reason I started on my 6502 Virtual Trainer last year. Most models of Texas Instrument's graphing calculators use a Z80, which was a competitor to the 6502 in the past. Those models have a 6 or 15MHz clock. The Z80 needs roughly three times more cycles than a 6502 to accomplish the same task, so running this calculator at 5MHz should be as fast as one of those calculators at 15MHz. At the maximum speed of 14MHz, it should be nearly three times as fast. Interestingly, Hewlett Packard did produce several non-graphing calculators like the HP-35S, which used a 8502 chip based on the 6502. Later models of TI calculators used the Motorola 68000 and the latest use ARM processors. These will certainly outperform anything I could make with a 6502. My hope is to make something in power between the Z80 and 68000 series with a few added features.
So far I have finished most of the decoding logic in the ATF1508 CPLD I have been working on. It has 57
IO pins and I have managed to use them all without finishing all the functionality I need. My plan is to use a 512KB SRAM chip with the first 2KB of address space always mapped to the first 2KB of the SRAM. The next two 30KB chunks of address space will point to two windows in the SRAM controlled by the CPLD. This will let me copy large chunks of data between two parts of the SRAM without changing the window between copies. Hopefully 30KB is enough for any single program the calculator will need to run. The last 2KB will be the EEPROM. This is hopefully enough space for a small bootloader that will copy firmware from an SD card and into the SRAM banks. The peripherals like the keyboard and LCD are mapped into the last few bytes of the first 2KB of SRAM.
For the LCD I found a fairly cheap 3.2 inch 320x240 color LCD on eBay. It is the perfect size for a calculator like this. It was also easy to get working with an MSP430 and some shift registers. The only downside is that I did not get an SPI version and I do not have enough CPLD pins to drive the 16 bit data port. The good news is that the LCD seems to expect 3v signals, so I will need some shift registers for level shifting anyway, which frees up a lot of pins. I don't think I will be able to finish very much more of this project for Makevention but I would like to get it drawing to the LCD from a program stored on an EEPROM by then. If I do have extra time, I will work on getting it to read a keypad.
So far I have finished most of the decoding logic in the ATF1508 CPLD I have been working on. It has 57
Sunday, July 12, 2015
New Project: Programmable RPN Calculator
One of the projects I started on for my Summer Hackathon is a new version of my RPN calculator. This version uses an LPC1114 instead of the two MSP430s the last version used. Hopefully this version will be much smaller and faster. Even though I'm not yet at a good stopping place I wanted to make a post about it so that the last post is not overly long.
Porting the code from the MSP430 was not too difficult. The only real trouble was moving some of the memory registers from the external RAM to the internal RAM of the LPC1114. This really increases calculation speed since it eliminates the bottleneck of accessing external memory. On the MSP430 version I used a preprocessor function to identify and replace any array access to the external RAM with functions calls. This worked well since all of the registers were stored externally but caused a few headaches on the new version since internally stored registers need to be handled differently. One idea I had was to use 32 bit pointers, which wouldn't cause the performance hit they do on a 16-bit system, to somehow encode not only the memory address, but also the memory bank and whether an address is stored externally or internally. It also seems like it would make more sense to allocate memory buffers on a stack as they are needed, rather than hardcoding them in memory. This got me thinking about how other systems handle this problem and I decided to add a way to do that to my 6502 project with a CPLD.
Along the way I also noticed a few areas where I could improve my code. For some reason I got in the habit of reusing generic counter variables like x or i in an effort to save memory. This just makes everything harder to read and does not save any memory since GCC optimizes how variables are used anyway. BCD numbers should also be stored with the smallest places first since that way extending the number by a decimal place only involves incrementing the length field rather than moving every byte of the number one space. In retrospect 255 decimal places is probably way too much for such a simple calculator. This didn't make much difference when I had lots of external RAM but is inconvenient now that I am trying to fit as many registers as I can into the LPC1114's memory.
To read and write the external RAM I'm using the chip's SPI peripheral. It turned out to be somewhat difficult to configure since several of the steps to get it to work have to be done in a certain order. Debugging this was a lot easier with a logic analyzer. After I had it working and got the memory registers straightened out, I was a little surprised to see that calculating sine was slower than on the MSP430. This was a shock since it was so much faster in my microcontroller comparison. I tried raising the SPI peripheral speed to 24MHz, even though the max speed of the RAM is 20MHz, but it was still slower. My next step is to try and measure the clock speed of the SPI with the logic analyzer to make sure it really is going that fast. After I got sine to work, I uncommented other parts of the program in parts to see how much would fit in the flash. Compiling with GCC's -O3 option for speed optimization quickly overflowed the flash but all of it fit in less than 20KB with -Os. One of my gripes with GCC is that it doesn't tell you by how much the firmware is too large, so you have no clue how much you would need to shave off for it to fit.
Initializing and toggling the pins of the LPC1114 is a bit more complicated than on the MSP430 since different pins have different configuration bits and the pins themselves are not mapped into memory in order. I had a look at the HAL library and it seems to use quite a bit of code for what I want to accomplish so I wrote a simple class for handling pins. Luckily I can use C++ since I am just compiling with GCC, unlike with OpenSTM32 where I was stuck with plain C. One neat thing someone showed me was how to use operator overloading so that something like "Pin=1;" does the same as "Pin.high();"
Since I have so much space left over in the flash, I started adding a keystroke programming function. This was one of the neat things I have always liked about earlier calculators. I am nearly done with the editor on the screen for it, which I'm working on with the PC version of the program since it is much faster to test. The next time I do a project like this I will put the PC and embedded version in the same file and enable them with include statements instead of copying the changed sections of the PC version. So far I am only adding the ability to repeat keys and not loop or branch since I want to finish this and at least one other project in time for Makevention in August. When I have more time I hope to add that functionality.
Porting the code from the MSP430 was not too difficult. The only real trouble was moving some of the memory registers from the external RAM to the internal RAM of the LPC1114. This really increases calculation speed since it eliminates the bottleneck of accessing external memory. On the MSP430 version I used a preprocessor function to identify and replace any array access to the external RAM with functions calls. This worked well since all of the registers were stored externally but caused a few headaches on the new version since internally stored registers need to be handled differently. One idea I had was to use 32 bit pointers, which wouldn't cause the performance hit they do on a 16-bit system, to somehow encode not only the memory address, but also the memory bank and whether an address is stored externally or internally. It also seems like it would make more sense to allocate memory buffers on a stack as they are needed, rather than hardcoding them in memory. This got me thinking about how other systems handle this problem and I decided to add a way to do that to my 6502 project with a CPLD.Along the way I also noticed a few areas where I could improve my code. For some reason I got in the habit of reusing generic counter variables like x or i in an effort to save memory. This just makes everything harder to read and does not save any memory since GCC optimizes how variables are used anyway. BCD numbers should also be stored with the smallest places first since that way extending the number by a decimal place only involves incrementing the length field rather than moving every byte of the number one space. In retrospect 255 decimal places is probably way too much for such a simple calculator. This didn't make much difference when I had lots of external RAM but is inconvenient now that I am trying to fit as many registers as I can into the LPC1114's memory.
To read and write the external RAM I'm using the chip's SPI peripheral. It turned out to be somewhat difficult to configure since several of the steps to get it to work have to be done in a certain order. Debugging this was a lot easier with a logic analyzer. After I had it working and got the memory registers straightened out, I was a little surprised to see that calculating sine was slower than on the MSP430. This was a shock since it was so much faster in my microcontroller comparison. I tried raising the SPI peripheral speed to 24MHz, even though the max speed of the RAM is 20MHz, but it was still slower. My next step is to try and measure the clock speed of the SPI with the logic analyzer to make sure it really is going that fast. After I got sine to work, I uncommented other parts of the program in parts to see how much would fit in the flash. Compiling with GCC's -O3 option for speed optimization quickly overflowed the flash but all of it fit in less than 20KB with -Os. One of my gripes with GCC is that it doesn't tell you by how much the firmware is too large, so you have no clue how much you would need to shave off for it to fit.
Initializing and toggling the pins of the LPC1114 is a bit more complicated than on the MSP430 since different pins have different configuration bits and the pins themselves are not mapped into memory in order. I had a look at the HAL library and it seems to use quite a bit of code for what I want to accomplish so I wrote a simple class for handling pins. Luckily I can use C++ since I am just compiling with GCC, unlike with OpenSTM32 where I was stuck with plain C. One neat thing someone showed me was how to use operator overloading so that something like "Pin=1;" does the same as "Pin.high();"
Since I have so much space left over in the flash, I started adding a keystroke programming function. This was one of the neat things I have always liked about earlier calculators. I am nearly done with the editor on the screen for it, which I'm working on with the PC version of the program since it is much faster to test. The next time I do a project like this I will put the PC and embedded version in the same file and enable them with include statements instead of copying the changed sections of the PC version. So far I am only adding the ability to repeat keys and not loop or branch since I want to finish this and at least one other project in time for Makevention in August. When I have more time I hope to add that functionality.
Monday, July 6, 2015
2015 Hackaday Prize
Hackaday recently started a competition for projects that feature parts made by Atmel, Freescale, Microchip, or Texas Instruments. 50 prizes are being awarded for each group, so I entered my RPN Scientific Calculator into the TI competition. The winners were announced today and my project was one of the 50. My prize was a Bluefruit LE Sniffer, which I was able to order from the Hackaday store for free. I'm not sure what I will use it for yet since I don't have a smart phone. My project page for the calculator is here.Saturday, June 27, 2015
Improved 6502 Virtual Trainer
Over the last few days I have made a lot of progress on this project. The main hurdle was getting a USB Virtual Com Port example running with the toolchain. The code from the first 6502 Virtual Trainer, which used an MSP430, was pretty easy to port to the STM32. After I got single-stepping to work, as I mentioned in my last post, I worked on the mode that stores the entire address space on the chip. It was a little surprising at first that it only ran at about 23,000hz. This is not much faster than the 14,000hz I was running at with the MSP430 version. My initial suspicion was that the transfers between the chip and PC to keep their respective copies of the address space synced were taking too much time. Timing the transfers showed that the chip usually spent over 90% of its time executing code, however. The biggest speed up came by manipulating the GPIO registers directly, rather than relying on the cumbersome HAL functions. Another thing I tried was changing the baud rate, although I couldn't find where it was initialized in the code. Eventually I found out that the Virtual Com Port doesn't rely on any sort of baud rate setting. A few other small improvements got the speed up to 350,000hz or so. When I found out how to turn on GCC optimizations in the System Workbench IDE, the speed got up to over 770,000hz. That's 0.77MHz! It's not quite the 1MHz I had hoped for but it is over 50 times faster than the first version.My original plan was to leave the IDE unchanged so that it would be compatible with both the old
MSP430 board and the new STM32 version, but I had to change a few things. For one, I was only transferring two bytes of data to count how many clock cycles had been executed since the last update, so I had to add a third one since the new board runs so much faster. The old version synced with the IDE when at least 64 bytes of data needed to be transferred. This is the most I could store in the MSP430's internal RAM. The new limit is 200, which wastes less time syncing when lots of data is transferred. A few thousand bytes would probably be even better, but the IDE wasn't able to keep up. This could probably be fixed but 200 is fine for now.
Now that I am finished with this project I can start on programming the calculator I hope to build for the Makevention in August.
Thursday, June 25, 2015
Summer Hackathon: Update
During the past few weeks I have had a lot of time to work on the projects I planned for my Summer Hackathon. So far I haven't made as much progress as I hoped, mostly because two of them took a lot more time to get going than I expected. Here is my what I have done so far on the ones I have worked on.
EEPROM Computer
Basing a computer architecture on precomputed lookup tables seemed like a an interesting idea when I started working on an assembler program for a 4-bit EEPROM-based computer. On IRC I explained what I was intending and the creator of the CADET computer showed me what he had accomplished. It is more or less the same thing I wanted to build, so I decided to stop work on this project for the time being. After discussing the idea with a friend at our hackerspace, I decided that it would only be worth continuing this project if I expanded it to a 16 or 32-bit architecture.
Brainfuck Microcontroller
For this project I have only hooked up four 74ALS193 counters since the last update. These will be the address counters for the program memory. My plan is to build the computer in small parts on a breadboard and transfer them to protoboard when I finish each piece. Rather than lay everything out on a a large board, I started soldering 8x12cm boards that will stack with double row headers. This way I will have plenty of pins to transfer signals between boards. I also plan to put LEDs on the topmost board to show signals like the address, jump buffer, op code, data pointer, and control signals.
ESP8266
A guy at our hackerspace was having trouble getting his ESP8266 going, so I set mine up to figure
out how to do it. Luckily for me, mine worked fairly well on the first try. The 03 variant I bought last year looked especially good since it is a little smaller than the others I looked at, and has several GPIOs, which I will need for one of the projects I have planned. One inconvenient thing is the 2mm pitch of the pins, which is slightly smaller than the 2.54mm, or 0.1'', pitch of a breadboard, but I soldered a small adapter. The firmware behavior is a little different than what some of the tutorials say to expect, but I was able to get a list of wireless networks at my house and connect to the WiFi at our hackerspace.
The LED of my friend's ESP8266 only lit dimly on my breadboard, as the voltage dropped down as low as 2.3v when run through the 3.3v LM1117 regulator I was running my repurposed 5v supply through. We haven't been able to figure out why this happens yet. For my chip the voltage also sank to about 3v, but it was still enough to keep the chip working. The supply itself seems to be good, as it delivers 5.18v, so I think the problem is with the regulator. When I tested the supply without the regulator on a breadboard with the 74ALS193 counters for the Brainfuck microcontroller, one side of the breadboard was down to 4.8v while the supply was still at 5.18v. Moving the jumper wires on the power rails around brought everything back to 5.18v
Wireless Breadboard
This project was especially exciting to me because it can be used to debug several of the other projects. To begin with I cut one of my 8x12cm protoboards in half and soldered single-row female headers to them, so a breadboard with male headers soldered on could be plugged into it. Unfortunately, I miscalculated the width of the breadboard and soldered the female headers on too wide apart. My local shop has been out of headers lately, so I tried to desolder the headers and broke a row of them in half in the process. So far I would consider this project a failure.
ATF1508 CPLD
This is an essential part of the 6502-based calculator I am hoping to build soon. Unfortunately, it has been my main source of headaches over the past few weeks. First of all, I tried to program the chip with an MSP430 generating JTAG signals from an svf file but this failed. After some searching, I found out that the JTAG standard is not really "standard" at all, and chips from different manufacturers handle the standard differently. Next, I tried generating a pcf file from the svf file, because it contains the actual states of every pin on every clock cycle. Although this worked and I could program the chip, the programming steps were ridiculously complicated. After using Atmel's WinCUPL program (which itself is rather unpleasant to use) to generate a JEDEC file, I convert it to an svf file with the Atmel ISP program. The problem with this is that the program offers a couple of nonsense error messages and just crashes if the FTDI cable I use to communicate with the MSP430 is still plugged in when I start the program or click the button to generate the svf file. Next, I have to switch to a virtual machine to generate the pcf file, since Atmel's SVF2PCF utility is 16-bit only.
After generating this, I have to replug my FTDI cable into USB and start a program I wrote myself to stream the PCF bytes to the MSP430. In an effort to streamline the process, I tried using Altera's SVF2PCF utility to generate the pcf file, since it is 32-bit, but unbelievably it leaves out all delay statements necessary for programming. When I tried transferring this file, the CPLD stopped responding and is now essentially bricked. For some incomprehensible reason the pins necessary for programming can be reassigned to other purposes, rendering the chip unprogrammable. At $14 apiece, this was an expensive error to make.
When my troubles with this chip started, I ordered a Byteblaster JTAG programmer, as the Atmel datasheets list this as a possibility for programming the chip. When it arrived, I quickly found out that the USB Byteblaster I had ordered has nothing at all to do with the Byteblaster cable that Atmel ISP can use. The open source driver I tried for the programmer caused my Windows 7 computer to crash with the blue sreen. Next, I ordered a USB to parallel converter cable, since the schematic for the Byteblaster is just a 74HC244 chip connected to the parallel port. So far I have not tried programming with this chip and may go back to programming with the pcf files generated by Atmel's 16-bit SVF2PCF utility.
Improved 6502 Virtual Trainer
In my post about GCC for the STM32F429 I explained how difficult it had been to get a GCC toolchain running. While I did get the toolchain to work in the end, I was unable to make any of the USB-to-serial examples work. This is very attractive for this project because I could use the chip as a Virtual Com Port and wouldn't need an FT232 chip or USB-to-serial cable. Many examples used the STM32CubeMx program from ST to generate the base code. None of the generated projects, however, can be opened with Eclipse, This is especially disappointing considering that the page for the utility lists GCC as a supported toolchain (although it is not actually in the list of toolchains in the project generator!) and provides an Eclipse plugin form of the utility. As I stated before, developing for STM32 with free tools has been a real pain! I tried the OpenSTM32 IDE, which is based on Eclipse and the libopencm3 library. This was able to compile a USB project generated by STM32CubeMx, but not without a good bit of fiddling with the files generated.
Next I soldered a small board for the 6502 that fits on the STM32 board. The pins of each port are not grouped together on the chip or on the headers on the board, but 8 of the 16 pins of port A are grouped together so I connected the 6502 data bus to them. Pins PA1 and PA2 only rose to 0.6v when driven high, which seems to be due to them being connected to some of the peripherals on the board. I connected PB1 and PB2 in those pins' place, so reading or writing the data bus means combining data from two different ports, but it does work. So far I have the chip working in single-cycle mode with the same software I made for the first trainer. My plan is to leave this software unchanged so it will work with either board.
Makevention
Our hackerspace is sponsoring a convention for makers in August and I would like to show some of my calculator projects there, so for the next two months I plan to focus mostly on the Improved 6502 Trainer and ATF1508 CPLD. These will both be necessary for the next calculator I want to build.
EEPROM Computer
Basing a computer architecture on precomputed lookup tables seemed like a an interesting idea when I started working on an assembler program for a 4-bit EEPROM-based computer. On IRC I explained what I was intending and the creator of the CADET computer showed me what he had accomplished. It is more or less the same thing I wanted to build, so I decided to stop work on this project for the time being. After discussing the idea with a friend at our hackerspace, I decided that it would only be worth continuing this project if I expanded it to a 16 or 32-bit architecture.
Brainfuck Microcontroller
For this project I have only hooked up four 74ALS193 counters since the last update. These will be the address counters for the program memory. My plan is to build the computer in small parts on a breadboard and transfer them to protoboard when I finish each piece. Rather than lay everything out on a a large board, I started soldering 8x12cm boards that will stack with double row headers. This way I will have plenty of pins to transfer signals between boards. I also plan to put LEDs on the topmost board to show signals like the address, jump buffer, op code, data pointer, and control signals.ESP8266
A guy at our hackerspace was having trouble getting his ESP8266 going, so I set mine up to figure
out how to do it. Luckily for me, mine worked fairly well on the first try. The 03 variant I bought last year looked especially good since it is a little smaller than the others I looked at, and has several GPIOs, which I will need for one of the projects I have planned. One inconvenient thing is the 2mm pitch of the pins, which is slightly smaller than the 2.54mm, or 0.1'', pitch of a breadboard, but I soldered a small adapter. The firmware behavior is a little different than what some of the tutorials say to expect, but I was able to get a list of wireless networks at my house and connect to the WiFi at our hackerspace.
The LED of my friend's ESP8266 only lit dimly on my breadboard, as the voltage dropped down as low as 2.3v when run through the 3.3v LM1117 regulator I was running my repurposed 5v supply through. We haven't been able to figure out why this happens yet. For my chip the voltage also sank to about 3v, but it was still enough to keep the chip working. The supply itself seems to be good, as it delivers 5.18v, so I think the problem is with the regulator. When I tested the supply without the regulator on a breadboard with the 74ALS193 counters for the Brainfuck microcontroller, one side of the breadboard was down to 4.8v while the supply was still at 5.18v. Moving the jumper wires on the power rails around brought everything back to 5.18vWireless Breadboard
This project was especially exciting to me because it can be used to debug several of the other projects. To begin with I cut one of my 8x12cm protoboards in half and soldered single-row female headers to them, so a breadboard with male headers soldered on could be plugged into it. Unfortunately, I miscalculated the width of the breadboard and soldered the female headers on too wide apart. My local shop has been out of headers lately, so I tried to desolder the headers and broke a row of them in half in the process. So far I would consider this project a failure.
ATF1508 CPLD
This is an essential part of the 6502-based calculator I am hoping to build soon. Unfortunately, it has been my main source of headaches over the past few weeks. First of all, I tried to program the chip with an MSP430 generating JTAG signals from an svf file but this failed. After some searching, I found out that the JTAG standard is not really "standard" at all, and chips from different manufacturers handle the standard differently. Next, I tried generating a pcf file from the svf file, because it contains the actual states of every pin on every clock cycle. Although this worked and I could program the chip, the programming steps were ridiculously complicated. After using Atmel's WinCUPL program (which itself is rather unpleasant to use) to generate a JEDEC file, I convert it to an svf file with the Atmel ISP program. The problem with this is that the program offers a couple of nonsense error messages and just crashes if the FTDI cable I use to communicate with the MSP430 is still plugged in when I start the program or click the button to generate the svf file. Next, I have to switch to a virtual machine to generate the pcf file, since Atmel's SVF2PCF utility is 16-bit only.
After generating this, I have to replug my FTDI cable into USB and start a program I wrote myself to stream the PCF bytes to the MSP430. In an effort to streamline the process, I tried using Altera's SVF2PCF utility to generate the pcf file, since it is 32-bit, but unbelievably it leaves out all delay statements necessary for programming. When I tried transferring this file, the CPLD stopped responding and is now essentially bricked. For some incomprehensible reason the pins necessary for programming can be reassigned to other purposes, rendering the chip unprogrammable. At $14 apiece, this was an expensive error to make.When my troubles with this chip started, I ordered a Byteblaster JTAG programmer, as the Atmel datasheets list this as a possibility for programming the chip. When it arrived, I quickly found out that the USB Byteblaster I had ordered has nothing at all to do with the Byteblaster cable that Atmel ISP can use. The open source driver I tried for the programmer caused my Windows 7 computer to crash with the blue sreen. Next, I ordered a USB to parallel converter cable, since the schematic for the Byteblaster is just a 74HC244 chip connected to the parallel port. So far I have not tried programming with this chip and may go back to programming with the pcf files generated by Atmel's 16-bit SVF2PCF utility.
Improved 6502 Virtual Trainer
In my post about GCC for the STM32F429 I explained how difficult it had been to get a GCC toolchain running. While I did get the toolchain to work in the end, I was unable to make any of the USB-to-serial examples work. This is very attractive for this project because I could use the chip as a Virtual Com Port and wouldn't need an FT232 chip or USB-to-serial cable. Many examples used the STM32CubeMx program from ST to generate the base code. None of the generated projects, however, can be opened with Eclipse, This is especially disappointing considering that the page for the utility lists GCC as a supported toolchain (although it is not actually in the list of toolchains in the project generator!) and provides an Eclipse plugin form of the utility. As I stated before, developing for STM32 with free tools has been a real pain! I tried the OpenSTM32 IDE, which is based on Eclipse and the libopencm3 library. This was able to compile a USB project generated by STM32CubeMx, but not without a good bit of fiddling with the files generated.
Next I soldered a small board for the 6502 that fits on the STM32 board. The pins of each port are not grouped together on the chip or on the headers on the board, but 8 of the 16 pins of port A are grouped together so I connected the 6502 data bus to them. Pins PA1 and PA2 only rose to 0.6v when driven high, which seems to be due to them being connected to some of the peripherals on the board. I connected PB1 and PB2 in those pins' place, so reading or writing the data bus means combining data from two different ports, but it does work. So far I have the chip working in single-cycle mode with the same software I made for the first trainer. My plan is to leave this software unchanged so it will work with either board.Makevention
Our hackerspace is sponsoring a convention for makers in August and I would like to show some of my calculator projects there, so for the next two months I plan to focus mostly on the Improved 6502 Trainer and ATF1508 CPLD. These will both be necessary for the next calculator I want to build.
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