6/11/09: Finals have started and will end next week. Should stall development, but then summer will start and it will accelerate.

 

6/10/09: Presentation of PropComp at school for final programming project has been completed. Feedback was positive, feels good to have it done with. Along with the prototype version 1 of the computer was also presented with its new retro case. Project will proceed as before, maybe faster now that it is summer, with work being focused on finishing version 1 of the computer and making it fully portable and useable. Should be working for the start of the next school year.

 

3/35/09: PropComp has been launched into the wild.

 

3/30/09: We launch the PropComp in four days!

3/24/09: We have learned how to use the Propeller and it has turned out to be quite amazing. The programming language it uses, Spin, is easy to use and powerful. As of now we have a working SD module and boot loader, it now officially is a real computer. All there is now is to add apps and maybe make a nice GUI.

3/14/09: Different projects for school have been taking up all my time for the last month. My birthday finally rolled around, and I received a Parallax Propeller, which we are going to use as the main piece for the CS Project. It has support for almost all the modules we were planning on making built in. This makes it possible to write the modules in code and just flash it to the Propeller, no other hardware needed except for the input devices. Hopefully we can use the carcasses of our modules to extend the capabilities of the Propeller and make it have some really nice features.

2/3/09: Lots of work done on the site, a lot of media has been added along with descriptions.

2/1/09: The code is now more robust, and the simple hello world program works every time. For some reason when I use a for loop to write text  to the screen it reverts to the original problem of dropped commands. Hopefully I'll get it working perfectly by the end of the week and we'll be able to start working on interfacing the keyboard module.

1/31/09: Midterm exams were a huge time suck, so we haven't had time to work for a while. Today I finally made some significant progress on the dropped command problem. The text that is now drawn on the screen does not reset the entire screen if a byte gets dropped. I got "hello world" displayed fairly easily, but for some reason letters still get skipped. It takes multiple tries to get all the text on the screen, but sometimes it does it in one go. I'll have to mess around with the code to make it more robust.

1/20/09: I wrote the code to fix the dropped commands today in French class. Too late today to actually test it on the hardware. All it does is add an extra function called serialChk(int message) that sends any value over serial but makes sure that an acknowledgment is received. If an acknowledgment message is not received then the data is sent again.

Inauguration day (yay!).

1/19/09: We finally got the video module working today. Came two days ago, but I was not having any luck with it. Now it seems that the problem was a badly soldered cable that linked the module to the Arduino. Still not working very well. All the commands work, but the way the code is set up now the messages being sent over serial can easily become messed up. This makes it skip commands which ends with only part of the stuff displayed on screen. The next step is to add error checking so that if the module sends back an error the Arduino can just send the command again.

We have two demos set up, one that prints "hello world" in white text on a black background, and one that cycles through all the background colors. The second one is actually rather pretty to watch.