Annoying how slow the progress is if you can not spend enough time on your project....

Just a few days after the last update, I also connected the 8-bit ALU board and the 4x8 bit register board to the motherboard. This should make 8 of the 16 databits and half of the registers operational.

I could enter instructions manually with the buttons connected with a flatcable to the PROG pcb (described in previous log). And YES, I could execute several instructions successfully, like addition, saving to RAM, loading from RAM !  I did not test all instructions, but I do not remember an instruction go wrong (that may be selective memory, it's already a few months ago).

Anyway, testing branches can not be fully done in this way. The control system will not load the instruction that follows a branch, so that it executes as NOP. But it has no way to prevent me from entering instructions manually...  So there is no escaping, it is time for a real program to be run from flash memory. 

So the next sub-project is a flash memory programmer. I intend to do this with a Raspberry Pi. It can connect to my website that provides the javascript assembler. It could simply write the object code to its own filesystem, and then a Python program could program the parallel flash through RPi I/O.

The javascript SIMAS (simulator-assembler) had an annoying 'feature', it did run quite slow. I examined it, and found that for small programs it was OK but with longer assembly programs it became slow. I suspected the Angular framework code. So I threw that out, I didn't understand it very well anyway. But it did not help.

Then I switched from Chrome to FireFox, and suddenly the speed problem was gone...  I don't know why. But I'm not interested in investigating it further. There are enough other things to do.

The SIMAS ( simulator-assembler ) had one of the first versions of the instruction set. So I updated it to the newest instruction set. It has two memory spaces now (program and data). To have initialized data, the assembler simply copies the first few hundred bytes of program space to the data space. This is something that a real program will have to do itself.

The layout of the program was also changed. The left side of the screen now has a textfield for entering your program. The center has a bigger textfield, that shows the source code together with the assembled machine code. And the nicest feature...  in the center window, all program lines that were executed get a blue background, and the current line after the program halted is red. So the blue background shows you the execution path that the software has taken after the last keypress of the calculator.

The buttons that simulate the calculator were re-ordered, to be similar to the pcb that I designed for the keyboard a few months ago.

Finally, I worked on the calculator application. It will now do all functions, except the trigonometry functions. The latest code is now automatically loaded when you load the webpage. You can try it at www.enscope.nl/rrca  Before operating the calculator, first press "Assemble" and then "Run".

I updated the HAD file section. The architecture and instruction listing are now in a single document. The schematics are updated and are according to the pcb's. Gerbers of the pcb's are also provided.