2007-08-30
The pinball machine as it exists so far had to be moved out of the rented workshop I was using, because the house it was in is about to be closed due to the danger of collapsing. The machine is now stored in my appartment's basement storage room. I consider this good on one hand, because it is now stored dry and warm and I can integrate the electronics without fearing for them, but bad on the other hand, because the said storage room is quite full now, and I cannot do any painting/milling/noise-generating jobs in there because of the other parties living in that house.
2007-04-10
I am evaluating as31, an 8051-family assembler running on FreeBSD, and sdcc, an open source C compiler for several microcontrollers, including the 8051 architecture. Currently I am developing the I/O controller firmware using a Windows system (the same one that controls my EPROM programmer), but I would like to move the programming part to FreeBSD, and only do the chip programming on Windows. Currently, as31 looks quite basic, lacking builtin looping or conditional statements - this might either be because I have yet to find a real manual for developing with it, or because the functionality is just not there, being an assembler and nothing else. It does take assembly language and generates hexcode to burn, after all... I will first adopt the existing firmware to as31, and then evaluate the coding workflow and sourcecode, and then maybe implement it once again in C, and check the code generated from sdcc. ASEM-51 looks quite promising, but is closed source (though available for free).
2007-03-27
Started this log for curious watchers of the project.
2007-03-26
Finally, after having moved from central Hamburg to a somewhat more quiet part of the town, I finished to get my Windows PC to work again. This included buying one new monitor, constructing a wooden shelf for the non-hacker workroom, emptying a truckload of cardboard boxes into that shelf, toting the old monitor to the hacker workroom, and rigging the PC up again.
With this, I was able to burn another EEPROM with the I/O controller firmware, and hook it up to the digital storage oscilloscope I have bought on eBay a while ago. Now debugging of the firmware may begin...
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