Thursday, February 21, 2013

Surfacing

It's been a while since I posted.  A long time.  Not for a lack of work, just been spending more time on the projects and less on pictures and writeup.  I plan to continue to document my projects, but more via youtube video than here.

I've been spending a bit of time working on a few projects:
  • A Tandy Color Computer retro project, developing a bus interface to mimic both ROM and a few of the more common and useful peripherals, particularly the floppy disk interface.  I have the basic circuit design done, and I'm waiting on a small batch of boards to be fabricated.  My proof of concept links the CoCo 3 to the Altera DE-2 FPGA board, but the real unit has a 32K EEPROM and a connector to interface with an Arduino Mega board, using a CPLD to handle signaling glue.  The intent is to have the board support EEPROM programming from the Arduino, the CoCo accessing the ROM by itself, or the CoCo talkign to both the Arduino and the EEPROM.
  • I've been learning more about FPGAs and CPLDs and Verilog generally.  Lots of fun.
  • The industrial control project I started has evolved a lot.  I'm currently working on a custom PLC that's programmable via an Android tablet.  We're getting near final testing and tweaks, so more video on that soon.
  • The TinyG tablet app has taken a back seat, in part because I've been waiting for the communications protocols to firm up before I rewrote that part of the app.  It looks like a new release is happening soon, and so I expect I'll pick that up again.
That's pretty much it, but then again, that's about all I have time for at the moment.  Subscribe to me at http://www.youtube.com/user/Greyhound716/videos if you want to know when I post more stuff.