JP's Website

This is a follow-up to my last blog post.

One of my favourite things to do when I have some down time is to grab a random devkit from my pile of random devkits, and try and write some code that will run on it.

Two years after the last Synthesised event, I was back again with a revised History of PC Audio exhibit.

Intro In the last article, I set out the various versions of the Arm Architecture, and ones I've been focussed on whilst developing the aarch32-rt and aarch32-cpu libraries.

Intro I've recently been spending quite a bit of time working on Rust support for legacy 32-bit ARM architectures.

Background I sold my BBC Master at the last Bring and Buy at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge.

An offer you can't refuse Another one of those things happened just before Christmas.

I want to run Debian on my RiscPC, for reasons I'll get into.

Background A few weeks back I got a note on Bluesky, linking me to a website offering a free computer.

Background I write a lot of embedded software in Rust these days - sometimes for fun, and sometimes as training material, and sometimes for customers building safety-critical systems.

Background This is a follow up to the previous blog post.

Background I was browsing /r/vintagecomputing, as you do, and I came across this post: Hi all.

Background Cathode Ray Dude recently did an excellent video about the history of the PC case, particularly the early- and mid-1990s, and the various mainboard layouts that pre-date the ATX standard.

Background I have a thing for weird 90's RISC workstations running UNIX.

Backstory Having enjoyed some time with my Silicon Graphics POWER Indigo 2, I started to wonder what the other 1990's UNIX RISC machines might be like in comparison.

Intro It's been a busy year, so for my own edification, I wanted to record all the events I've attended this year.

Amstrad always wanted to have a 'killer product' out for Christmas.

On Mastodon, I recently came across a post by Kestral, with a link to their website: I find myself with significantly less time than I’d like to work on restoring all of these devices, so my hope is that folk in the community will take some off my hands,…

Retro Computer Festival 2024 I am presenting again at the Retro Computer Festival 2024, at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge, England.

Intro No sooner had I published the last piece than I found something really cool that I don't think is that well known.

Intro The Rust Platform Docs highlight lots of options you can turn on when programming an Arm microcontroller.

Intro Today sees the announcement of the latest additions to Raspberry Pi's microcontroller line-up - the RP2350 family.

This is a brief, abridged, and possibly in accurate history of audio on the IBM PC compatible.

You can now buy Neotron Pico boards direct from Elecrow.

Intro What follows are some thoughts I've had swirling around in my head for a while.

Intro Floppy disk drives are curious things.

Over the past couple of weeks I've been working on SD Card support for the Neotron Pico.

I've spent some time thinking about how to improve the PIO program that runs our Super VGA out.

The delivery from JLCPCB arrived yesterday (2022-11-23).

I hit BUY at JLCPCB, and ordered: 30 off Rev 1.0.0 (using up all the SMD parts I had pre-purchased and had JLC stash away for me) 25 off Expansion Card Template v0.7.0 Let's hope they work!

I worked on the Neotron BIOS interface this week.

You can now apply to be a Beta Tester and get a free Neotron Pico Kit: Sign up form and terms and conditions here: https://forms.gle/kxvUtNGSfCFAbtvo6

As a bit of an experiment, I thought I'd try loading CircuitPython for the Raspberry Pi Pico onto my Neotron Pico board.

In the last post I referred to some testing of the Audio CODEC using CircuitPython.

The latest rev 1.0.0 boards arrived today.

Back in May 2022, the Rust Foundation awarded funds to the Rust community through their Community Grants Programme.

I finally got my head around how the PIO state machines work and how the DMA subsystem works.

My Pico is now installed in my new Checkmate A1500 Plus case!

I put the broken board to one side and built up a second.

It tried to turn on the main DC PSU and I got a short circuit.

I designed this board without any other ATX board to compare to, or without an ATX case to measure up.

I got the first five v0.5.0 boards back.

The v0.5.0 PCB has been ordered from JLCPCB, with assembly for most SMD devices except: The CODEC The STM32 The MCP23S17 The RGB/HV ESD filter The RTC I have those parts in stock at home and will hand-assemble them when the boards arrive.

Well it's been a busy year.

So, the idea with the Monotron was to ask a simple question - how much can we do with a small, cheap, random microcontroller and the Rust Programming Language.

Yeah I know I talk about a lot of embedded stuff on here, but I do still think about my Model Railway.

So now @rustbeltrust is over, I thought it was worth writing down a few details about what Monotron can do.

It's a couple of months on from my talk at RustFest on Monotron, so I thought it was worth a quick catch up on where we're going next.

So, today I did a talk about Monotron at RustFest Paris.

I've had a few projects over the past few years using the TI Stellaris Launchpad.