Rants, Rambles, and Rhinos

Since I have been home over winter break, I felt like doing a little bit of fun hacking. As a few of my posts have shown, I am fairly interested in hardware oriented projects, so I thought I would try another. I have several AVR chips and support supplies laying around, so I thought I would use them. Recently, I have also been playing around with DJing. It is fairly common to use a controller to control a DJing setup, but they are all fairly expensive. Since they are just a collection of buttons, knows, and faders, I decided it would be interesting to try to make my own.

My inspiration for this project

This post will cover what I did for the various parts as well as some of the interesting bits of code, so that you can make your own!

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Lately, I have been doing work with the Pistachio L4 microkernel as part of my research. This requires building various disk images, installing GRUB, and running them inside of a virtual machine. Initially, I was using Linux to do this, since it had all the tools ready to go and was what everyone else was using. However, I have a Mac, so I wanted to be able to use that, rather than SSHing into a server all the time. I didn’t think it would be a big deal, just install the same tools on my Mac, right? Wrong! What follows is the odyssey of what I’ve gone through to do this. Hopefully, it will help anyone else facing a similar circumstance.

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I’m a pretty lazy person. I like to put things off, drag my feet, and make plans that I know will never come true. Perfect example, Fall 2008 I took a digital systems course where we designed a very basic (2-bit) CPU and I decided I wanted to continue working out of class to make a better one. Initially, I was actually making some progress, but quickly outgrew the basic chips (GAL chips) we were using at the time, so I screeched to a stop. After a few months of poking around, I figured out an FPGA might be a better way to go. However, these are expensive and would take a lot of effort to learn, so I put the idea on the back-burner.

Bill Buzbee's homemade CPU, which provided some inspiration for me.

Luckily for me though, my research group started to do some work with FPGA’s, so I was able to get some hands on experience with them. Despite having the needed tools though, I was still dragging my feet on doing any work. Well, a few days ago, I got re-inspired when I found a website about a guy called Bill Buzbee who built his own (and in my opinion) pretty complex CPU. It has all sorts of neat features such as paging and interrupts. Well, that was the inspiration I needed and now, a few days later, I’ve actually got some progress worth mentioning.

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