The latest challenge was to get the screen working. This section had a pretty big number of parts to add to the board, including the HDMI/DVI transmitter which needed soldering down to a large thermal pad under the chip. I did the pad using some low-temperature solder paste and …
Articles in the Deductotron category
Mass Storage
This week's challenge was to get the internal SD card slot working. There are 2 SD card slots on the board I designed, the internal one which is designed to be left in all the time as the main "hard drive" and an external one that can be used as …
Lights and Linkers
After last week's post I set myself three more tasks to get done:
- Get some decent fault handling setup
- Get the onboard LEDs working
- Try running code from the SDRAM
I've managed to achieve all of them, but they weren't all as easy as I'd thought.
Fault handling
Last time …
SDRAM Testing
With a working serial interface it was time to try bringing up the external memory. I've maxed out the available external memory on this chip, it can support up to 64MB of SDRAM on each of the two banks and that's what I've got. To hit the full 64MB capacity …
CLI Basics
With a proven UART interface and not a lot else I started working on a basic command line interface. I've written systems like this a few times before for commercial products but those implementations are all locked away in private code bases. The CLI is pretty simple, it takes bytes …
MCU Bring Up
Now that I have the PCBs and all of the parts its time to start bringing up the board. The good thing about using a microcontroller over a less integrated microprocessor is that I can bring it up on its own to start with. All I need is power supply …
Introduction
The Deductotron-1000 (or D1000 for short) is a weird style of computer. It's built to be a bit like the last generation of Acorn PCs (A7000, Risc PC type things) but with some slightly more modern interfaces. Really, that would describe a Raspberry Pi, but this is more modest in …