Ben Eater’s exciting 6502 project has reached the next stage – adding a display. But before I could play along, I had some remedial work to do. I’d achieved the previous stage of being able to get the LEDs to light up, but not reliably. Something was glitching and would cause the machine to go haywire. This isn’t entirely surprising… Read more »
Well, it does seem that the problem I’ve been having with the SmartParallel board is indeed that horror of horrors – the intermittent fault. Or perhaps something weirder. This is some kind of quantum device – it works only when being observed. Setting up a server The SmartParallel was working perfectly for a few days. Then I didn’t use it… Read more »
Hmm… maybe I spoke too soon. No sooner had I congratulated myself on a completed project than a problem raised its ugly head. And it was one that required some tracking down. And so, as this blog is my lab notebook, I thought I’d share what happened, as I always find other people’s tales of troubleshooting to be illuminating. One… Read more »
The Apatco 6502 breadboard computer kit I’ve been building is complete. The next stage was to make it more so. A word of warning, though. This story does not have a happy ending. Nonetheless, someone may find the attempt at debugging entertaining or instructional, so here it is. The kit is sold (or perhaps ‘was’ would be better, as it… Read more »
If in doubt, start again. That’s not a real saying, but it should be. As we saw in the last post, the Apatco 6502 breadboard computer was finally wired up but refusing to work. I’d fixed my faulty ROM code, buzzed out all the address and data lines to check they were connected correctly and determined that the reset circuit and… Read more »
Okay, so it was time to deal with something that has been nagging at me for a while. I have this Apatco kit 6502 breadboard computer kit and never quite got around to finishing the basic setup. It takes a lot of wiring. I just got tired, put it in a box and shoved it in the projects cupboard. For… Read more »
Don’t you hate it when something that was working stops? You can safely bet that it’s because, somewhere along the way, something has been ‘improved’. I needed to make a change to the code running on a couple of IoT room thermometers. These are built around the Adafruit Huzzah ESP8266 board (the non-Feather version). And they’ve been running flawlessly for months…. Read more »
It seems like an obvious point, but it’s sometimes handy to know what your code is up to. If you normally write code for desktop systems – and especially if you’re hacking out something that works on the command line – then it’s easy. Just pepper your program with print statements to show the state of play. (Then try to… Read more »
Do you ever get the feeling that a compiler is acting weird just to mess with your head? That’s how it felt yesterday. I was tinkering with the code for my HexMonitor. This uses an ATMEGA328P microcontroller to read values in from an eight-bit data bus or a 16-bit address bus (selectable via a switch) and display them on a… Read more »
Well, maybe not so much aha! More like FFS. Weird as it sounds, debugging errors is one of the things I enjoy about both coding and electronics. I’m an amateur in both fields and waste little time on planning my projects. I prefer just to delve right in. Rather than sketch out a circuit first, for example, I just get… Read more »