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VIBE, block storage ported to Kestrel Forth.

A project log for Kestrel Computer Project

The Kestrel project is all about freedom of computing and the freedom of learning using a completely open hardware and software design.

samuel-a-falvo-iiSamuel A. Falvo II 04/11/2016 at 20:320 Comments

Please see the latest project pictures for the editor and its use in action.

It's still not quite right. I have a memory corruption issue that I simply cannot track down yet, but thankfully it doesn't manifest often. I know there's a stack imbalance bug with unhandled keyboard events, so I'm going to debug that next. (These may be related, but hard to say definitively.)

Screen update performance is abysmal inside the editor, but that's because I update the display with zero cleverness at all (as brute as brute force will let me). I hope to address that in a later commit.

Access to SD card is roughly 17kbps (yes, kilo-bits per second) by my calculations. It's pretty slow. But, it's about as fast, or maybe approximately twice as fast, as the Kestrel-2. Also, again, SD card driver is written 100% in high-level Forth, so you get all the interpretation overhead to slow things down.

Also, I have to manually type

0blocks 0editor MOUNT THROW
to get everything working together. I will fix this in a later commit as well. Alas, it also implies you cannot remove the SD card at least until you FLUSH first. Be sure to MOUNT again after inserting a new card. Strange things will happen if you attempt to MOUNT the same card more than once.

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