Hack-A-Day reader Bogdan Marinescu does a better job summarizing his project than I ever could. You can get his source code, schematics and more details by following the “read” link.
This project is a truly stand-alone development platform. What does that mean? Well, you plug-in a PS/2 keyboard, a 320×240 LCD, and start typing code. The code is written in LUA. The compiler and interpreter for LUA run from the microcontroller. The code also contains a small editor (for the code), support for FAT12/FAT16 on MMC/SD cards, support for remote connections and a new FLASH-friendly embedded file system. The platform is ‘self-reproducible’, i.e. you can transfer code from one platform to another. The LCD/keyboard/MMC are optional, so you can have a big ‘development’ platform with everything in it and a lot of bare ‘production’ platforms that ‘reproduce’ their code directly from the development platform. A M16C microcontroller and an external 512K SRAM chip are all that is required to build the bare platform, the other components are just for interfacing different peripherals. Hope you’ll like the idea. The code is 95% functional, but it needs some more work and a lot more testing.
reminds me of good ‘ol Timex Sinclair, circa 1982
This guy is my hero.
Romanasu’ nostru :D!
Heh, glad you liked it :) As for the Spectrum … I always dreamt of hacing a mini-spectrum that I could carry with me around. But this thing is even better :)
P.S. Da, romanasu vostru :P
wow! i’ve always wanted to create a mini compiler that i could carry around. I am still a student in school, but would love to know what kind of knowledge you require in order to build a simple portable compiler wit a simple lcd screen and keyboard. I am a complete newbie, but have the will power to learn anything you throw at me. If someone could please point me in the right direction, perhaps a few links to get me started on a project such as this, i would highly appreciate it!
Well, for starters, you can download my full projects following the “read” link, and see what you can extract from there. Is pretty well documented ;)
when i follow the ‘read’ link, i get redirected to http://www.circuitcellar.com/renesas2005m16c/winners/1685.htm
do i download the “entry” link?
Yes, the “entry” link has everything inside (schematics, code, design document).
Intriguing… I wonder if this has any use in the gaming industry.
for some reason, when I do download the zip file found in the ‘entry’ link, the zip file seems to be corrupt or invalid. could you please point me to another link of that document?
I can download and open it without problems.