Bring back Blinkenlights!!! 3270
(Cross posting to comp.arch.embedded - somebody may find this useful there.) (Sorry! 1st reply went to "com.arch...")
Don Taylor
Congratulations! Sounds like a good idea.
in part: The KA10, of course, had a clbuttic DEC switches and lights front panel that - considerably later - inspired...
A variation that is perfectly suited to 8 bit micros with a 16 bit address bus is this: feed the high and low byte of the address bus to two D-A converters, use the analog outputs to drive the X-Y inputs of an oscilloscope. It is amazing how much information you can collect about what your code is doing by just looking at the resulting display. For example, an unlit spot in an area you know belongs to your data ram is data that is not being accessed, the relative intensity of the traces tells you where you are spending most of the time, etc.
Nah, that is too fancy. Just put a small AM radio next to your gear. Again, amazingly useful. (Not always, I concede.). After finding the right spot on the dial we may learn that "chirp" means a particular ISR is being called, that "buzz" comes form that function and so on.
On Sun, 23 Apr 2006, Brian Inglis Do you want to have a useful system, or do you want a plaything? Do you want something that you look at...
I would be interested. I would like to build (just for fun) an FPGA base computer. Every time I sit to make a few sketches the architecture changes, but the toggle switches and blinkenlights are always there.
Roberto Waltman
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Bring back Blinkenlights!!! 3271
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