I feel as though I have been spending most of my CORNELIUS efforts on the ELIUS (language) part, and neglecting the CORN (operating system) part. Recently, though, I have been thinking about the notion of a “hardware abstraction layer” (HAL). This is a common part of many systems, and serves to isolate the messy, hardware-specific …
As I slowly build my bare-metal operating system and language for the Raspberry Pi, I like to keep looking around for more sources of inspiration. I found a list of stack-based languages somewhere which (among many others) pointed me at Raven, an interesting combination of FORTH, Python and perl. A bit more digging on the …
Following yesterday’s bumpy start, I was determined to make some progress with Minecraft today. I had hunted round our storage and gathered the following: A Dell Vostro 200 desktop with 1GB RAM which my wife used before she got her laptop. We stopped using this because its hard drive broke and it refused to boot …
There has been a lot of excitement around the blogosphere following the announcement of a free version of the wildly popular game Minecraft for the Raspberry Pi. My teenagers and their friends are somewhat obsessed with the game, so the chance of drumming up a bit of interest in software and hardware development by joining …
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One of the characteristics of “Problem-Oriented Languages” (POL) is that they are tiny. The language run-time provides just enough to enable a programmer to extend the language into something appropriate to the needs and terminology of the domain. This “tininess” also extends to memory usage. On a single process system the complete language and operating …
I have just spent an annoying evening trying to get my little bluetooth keyboard working. Without success. Plenty of websites seem to offer instructions, but so far none of them have worked. I’m pretty sure the bluetooth adapter is compatible. It certainly gets as far as showing the ids of my keyboard and a nearby …
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That’ll teach me to go away for a weekend. It seems my previous post “Automatic Raspberry Pi board revision detection: model A, B1 and B2” was surprisingly popular. It was picked up by several important Raspberry Pi web sites and led to a significant spike in visitors. If you are someone who found their way …
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When the raspberry Pi model A was announced a few days ago, I ordered one straight away. With three different models of raspberry Pi now available (or four, if you count the red Chinese variant), working out the capabilities of the board is becoming increasingly important. It’s vital for anyone involved in making hardware or …
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This evening I presented a session on Raspberry Pi at The Ipswich Ruby User Group (IPRUG). I think the presentation went well, as dd the Q&A session which followed. Unfortunately, all my plans to demonstrate stuff fell through. Mainly this was due to my own lack of preparation rather than any problems with the hardware …
I have spent a few days planning for my talk at IPRUG tomorrow evening. One of the things I was hoping to do was demonstrate a standalone Raspberry Pi controlling a USB missile launcher that I have had laying around unused for a few years. I got the device out of its box, found some …