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Just a quick debrief this week, I’ve just started at university and things have been full-on with course work and figuring things out.
Style guide
I finished restructuring the Bedrock style guide, the new structure makes a lot more sense now for the kinds of questions that people will want answered. The previous version used the main headings Names, Whitespace, Comments, Miscellaneous, which was fiiine as far as grouping the information, but didn’t at all reflect how people would want to actually use the guide. The new revision is structured around Modules, Values, Functions, Macros, which immediately looks better.
bedrock-micro
I’ve also been chipping away on bedrock-micro. I put it down recently because I was stuck on how I’d go about debugging the microcontroller and device boards once I started flashing and assembling them, but I recently figured out a good approach to take. The plan is to rip bedrock-pc in half, with one half working as the core system and the other half working as the device bus and all devices, and then to run each half on a Raspberry Pi, using GPIO pins to implement the bedrock-micro device bus interface. This allows me to test each half of the real bedrock-micro in isolation, with known-working implementations of each other half to fill the gaps until the whole thing is finished.
One of the papers that I’m planning on taking in fourth year involves designing a computer processor and implementing it on an FPGA, and it’d be so cool if I could use that to also make a completely custom Bedrock processor. That’s more of a lark than anything, there’s plenty of existing silicon that will probably be much better at running Bedrock than anything I could design, but it’d be fun to play around with. So this bedrock-micro work also works as a set-up for that paper down the line.
The full plan is written out under the development plan heading of the bedrock-micro page.
Thanks
I’m hoping to keep up a decent tempo during the semester, but we’ll see how that goes. Thanks so much for your support, I hope you all have a great week!