Many very technically-inclined people will at some point come to the belief that regardless of spending years immersed in, and dealing with, expertise daily, they really have little or no understanding of how every thing actually works at a low degree. Some persons are completely joyful to work at excessive ranges of abstraction and never fear about these particulars. However for others, absolutely together with many readers of Hackster Information, this realization is sufficient to trigger them to get up evening after evening in a chilly sweat with a sense that they’ve been residing a lie.
The one identified remedy for this situation is hacking, which is in fact an efficient treatment for all method of illnesses. Particularly, designing computer systems, working techniques, or no matter else it might be that one doesn’t have a great understanding of. Going by means of the method of constructing a fancy system from scratch is the surest method to realize it in and out.
An skilled software program engineer by the identify of Shane Mason just lately realized that regardless of spending a few years working with high-level programming languages, what precisely occurs when these packages execute is a thriller to him. Initially, he determined to treatment this drawback by writing an working system for x86 techniques. However after a little bit of analysis, and discovering how advanced the structure is, he realized it was a bit an excessive amount of to chunk off for a pastime challenge.
After being impressed by documentaries concerning the early days of house computing, when a pc might be constructed from scratch by a person in a storage, Mason determined as a substitute to deal with constructing a retro-inspired pc from trendy microcontrollers, after which develop an working system for that machine. Positive, there are nonetheless many abstractions in such a system, however it’s far nearer to the naked metallic than one would usually get.
Referred to as Ficus, the pc has keyboard enter with the assistance of an Adafruit Feather RP2040, which has a built-in USB host to make the conversion of keystrokes to ASCII characters quite simple. This board can be hooked as much as a 20×4 character LCD show for primary output.
A UART connection from the Feather feeds translated keystrokes right into a Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller. When directions have to be executed, they’re offloaded to a employee node — one other Raspberry Pi Pico — by way of SPI for processing. An Adafruit Metro M4 Specific improvement board was additionally included, together with a 3.5-inch TFT show for extra superior graphical output.
Because the construct superior, Mason continued so as to add to it, piece by piece. A Raspberry Pi Pico W was included for networking help, an SD card reader for storage, and a real-time clock for timekeeping. Some RGB LEDs have been additionally added on to function standing lights.
Growth of the working system continues to be in progress, nevertheless it already helps enter and output, has a shell with many Unix shell instructions applied, and has easy file administration and textual content modifying capabilities. It’s even attainable to program the pc from the machine itself, which is a crucial function for any standalone system.
Whereas it really works, it’s not an particularly good pc, which Mason freely admits. The 1-bit knowledge bus and roughly 2 Hertz show refresh fee are removed from splendid. However as an train in studying extra about {hardware} and working techniques, Ficus was a giant success.
There are nonetheless some lingering points to resolve, nevertheless. Particularly, the pc is understood to lock up pretty steadily. As somebody who was sitting in an identical place years in the past, with no logic analyzer, scope, or a lot electronics information, my recommendation to Mason could be to construct some sort of floor airplane. The boards look to be kind of daisy-chained along with wiring. Likelihood is that sign ranges aren’t constant throughout the circuit, which might trigger all types of strange and seemingly inexplicable habits.The Ficus homebrew pc (📷: Shane Mason)
The principle parts (📷: Shane Mason)
Powering up Ficus (📷: Shane Mason)
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