Free idea: AR Poison Ivy Detector for people who want to destroy that shit from existence
| Website | http://bartolucci.org |
| GitHub | https://github.com/guidoism |
| Unfinished Aircraft | Van’s RV-8 |
Guido Bartolucci
@guidoism
- 37 Followers
- 159 Following
- 203 Posts
Programmer, pilot, starter of many unfinished projects. He/him. Gentlemen scientist? #unschooling #literateprogramming #tex #mmix #retrobrew #bolivia #homebuiltaircraft #basicincome #ubi believer in Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism
I wonder how many american quarters exist in Shenzhen just to take product photos.
The paper is http://gordonbell.azurewebsites.net/CGB%20Files/Computer%20Structures,%20What%20Have%20We%20Learned%20from%20PDP11%207511%20c.pdf and while the line is somewhat funny given the “unbroken tradition" I wonder what the equivalent failures are in the solar industry. What are we overlooking?
I was reading a paper by C. G. Bell from 1975 about what was learned from the PDP-11 in the six years since it was launched and I saw parallels between the computer industry in the 1970s and the solar industry in the 2020s.
This line struck me: “There is only one mistake that can be made in a computer design that is difficult to recover from—not providing enough address bits for memory addressing and memory management. The PDP-11 followed the unbroken tradition of nearly every known computer.”
@autumn hey Autumn I feel stupid asking such a simplistic question given the awesomeness of your project, but I would like some advice on how you connected the smd leds to registers (and buses) on the Sprout 24. Does each led have its own register and transistor?
I’m working on a “macro”-processor similar to yours and I would also like the Blinkenlights look but I’m kind of ignorant of how to run such a large array of leds. Any advice?
In the CPU I’m designing the register file is literally just 8 cheap 10ns SRAM parts. I’ll run them at twice the clock speed and double-pump them into the ALU latches to avoid needing the complexity and cost of dual-port parts.
The 32K×8 part is the cheapest I could find. Way cheaper (and faster I think) than trying to build a bunch of registers up from 7400-series parts.
It’s kind of crazy to me that for $1.38 × 8 I get 32,768 64-bit registers that can be run at 50MHz.
Maybe I’m seeing patterns where they don’t exist but… the register file even on a 40 year old CPU is really just RAM and the latches between the ALU and the buses are the real registers. In order to have general purpose registers you need to have a CPU within a CPU. Abstractions upon abstractions. The sequencing of the buses looks a hell of a lot like programming to me. We are programming a simpler computer in order to give the illusion of a more complex computer for the compiler to target.
Studio 8502 
It is legitimately bugging me that I seem to be the only person who wants to be able to buy an ARM or RISC-V or MIPS or SPARC CPU, implemented with an inexpensive FPGA, with a standard parallel memory bus.
I feel stupid for wanting to be able to take such a thing, stick two or four 8/16 bit wide SRAMS and ROMs on it, and have a play like it was Real Hardware™.
I still think it’s funny that I created my kids’ online handles as a riff off of Lothar of the Hill People and these names have stuck and become their online identities.
I’m still waiting for the ML people to figure out how to listen to me mumbling a rhyme in which I only remember the three words and tell me which children’s book it comes from. Last night I was losing my mind trying to figure out a rhyme from one of my kid’s books. Figured it out this morning: Edwina the Emu.