As I wrote in the last journal entry, I started to program that board...

The first program was a simple one, and made in schematics: an AND gate and an OR gate, driven by two switches and controlling two LEDs.
Not a great thing, but for me was important, beucase is my first "program" outside of a computer.

Next, I wanted something bigger: an adder, but the design failed (I really don't know why...) and so I leaved the schematics and started learning Verilog (form here: http://www.asic-world.com/verilog/verilog_one_day.html ), and wrote a tone generator at 440 Hz to test it.

Then I gone to the local store, bought an audio splitter, cut it, took two paper clips, used them to "wire" the audio port and voila ! It worked... Very good... now I can tell my friends I made my own audio player :D . And that's all until now... and for today I want to learn to use the VGA port with that FPGA. Wish me luck !

I haven't wrote here for a while...

I bought a fpga board (the BASYS board from http//www.digilentinc.com ) for 100$ (with shipping) and I made a test system with it.
I'll come back with more details soon.

Now I was going to buy the parts for my project but I'm a bit afraid... what if it won't work ?
I have to spend some time on reading the specifications from every component that I'll need, to match the operating frequency and voltage and other stuff like that.

Also, in my personal life (not the best topic to talk on slashdot) I'm somehow screwed due to my lack of attention on misc stuff. I forgot the phone on silent mode from yesterday and someone who needed some help called this morning... and after two hours, when I responded, I gave a incorrect information ... one move, two mistakes and I feel really sorry about that...
Learned lessons:
1. Use the "silent mode" of the mobile phone with caution ! It may be dangerous to your life !
2. Never relay on the new methods of communications ! I personally hate to use the internet to send important data. The GSM network is better, but not safe.

But, beucase I'm optimistic, I realize that this isn't the worst case scenario. She (yes, it's about a "she") surely has received the correct information from another person, because I didn't responded in time, and my delayed response was just "signal noise".

But enough with my sentiments, back to JTAG protocol .

Firstly, my mouse freaks me out: it has problems with the OY axis... I think it should be cleaned a bit.

But what's the reason for that I started to maker these and reinvent the wheel ? Because my informatics teacher gave me a bad mark a year ago, but mainly beucase I like to make stuff working, and the today's PC architecture seems old.

And the status of the project:

DONE:
  * found how an "adder" an a "substracter" are made using logic gates (for unsigned integers)
  * downloaded the specs of the USB and FPGA
  * amazed my friends with this project

ToDo (short term):
  * learn VHDL
  * figure out how to interact with the memory (& the registers)
  * find an old casette player to setup as R/W memory (remember Sinclair?)
  * order from the internet the FPGA

ToDo (long term):
  * make a new architecture for the processor
  * implement USB (with a stack and controller)
  * implement VGA (and a small video card)
  * implement Ethernet (IPv6 tunelled, I think, and a small network card)
  * implement audio (and a small audio card)
  * make it a 500MHz octal-core system-on-a-chip
  * build an OS for it
  * build programs for the OS
  * ??????
  * PROFIT !

Ok, maybe I'm just dreaming... but it seems so real ;)

About ten years ago I was touching for the first time a computer... and
Now I've made a small operating system (a floppy that boots and has some basic input/output functions), and I'm heading to make a new processor type.

I'd like to make this "journal" the web-log of the development process and as a motivational "thing"

I'll publish more as soon as possible.