Quote from: Jim Fouch on Oct 28, 2026, 11:13 PMI had a TI 99/4A for a year and was cutting my teeth. Then the next Christmas, my cousins got a 600XL. I was looking at the included BASIC instructions and saw it could draw lines from any point to any point on the screen. On the TI, you had to do all graphics in user definable characters and it took a ton of time. And it was really only useful for like 90 or 45 degree lines.

I had the TI-99/4A, but didn't do much with it. When I got it, it came with a speech synthesizer and a few games, two of which supported the speech module; Alpiner and Parsec. I still crack up when I think about Alpiner...climbing the mountain and running into a skunk, and the speech module, in it's War Games voice would say, "Eww! A skunk!" 

Quote from: Jim Fouch on Oct 28, 2026, 11:13 PMWent right off to the K-Mart and put an 800XL in lay-a-way. Cost me $129. Went back after paying it off and put a disk drive in lay-a-way for $180. Those were some good days to learn what a computer could do. :-)

So many computer systems required you to spend more money on the disk drive than the computer itself. But I didn't mind the datasette recorders early on.

Quote from: granz on Oct 29, 2026, 06:58 AMAre you asking for a review of the article linked at the beginning of this thread, or will you provide a link to the updated article?

The article linked at the top of this thread, minus the specified section.

Are you asking for a review of the article linked at the beginning of this thread, or will you provide a link to the updated article?

Is anyone else using AI for embedded work? I have mad amazing gains the last 3 weeks on a very complex project.

It's a two part system with an I/O module and a Head unit with a touchscreen. Both units have an STM32 as well as an ESP32-S3.

The STM32's are for the real heavy lifting. An STM32G474 and an STM32H743. They will do all of the collection and displaying of rider information. The ESP32's on each unit will act as a link between the two, but also as programmers of the STM32's.

One of the things that has been bouncing around in my head for at least 2-1/2 years was how to get the STM32H743 to keep the display going during the flashing process. I knew it could probably be done doing a custom RAM based bootloader. I have never written a bootloader in my life. So, to say this was something I was afraid of digging into is an understatement.

I want the display to inform the user as the flashing process happens. I don't want it to simply have a blank screen during the maybe 15-20 minute process. So I explained to CodeX what I wanted to do. I had already made the screen work and it was able to use that example to build a RAM bases transport that used the factory bootloader to load he custom bootloader into RAM. This takes maybe 2-3 seconds that the screen has no way displaying anything, but after that the ESP32 has full commands to paint anything on the screen. Text, lines even images. It also has full use of the touch panel.

I was expecting this to take me months to sort it all out. Even three weeks would have been great. CodeX had it running in like 10 minutes for the first working version. Now mind you it's actually the PC that I tested it with and programming the STM32H743, but the RAM bases bootloader was part of that test. I probably have less than 6 hours total now into that function.

Now that it's proven to work I had it create the programming side on the ESP32-S3. It crunched for 30 minutes. I'll test that in the next few days.

An 800XL was my 2nd computer back in 1984. I had a TI 99/4A for a year and was cutting my teeth. Then the next Christmas, my cousins got a 600XL. I was looking at the included BASIC instructions and saw it could draw lines from any point to any point on the screen. On the TI, you had to do all graphics in user definable characters and it took a ton of time. And it was really only useful for like 90 or 45 degree lines.

Went right off to the K-Mart and put an 800XL in lay-a-way. Cost me $129. Went back after paying it off and put a disk drive in lay-a-way for $180.

Those were some good days to learn what a computer could do. :-)

Quote from: JKnightandKARR on Oct 28, 2026, 10:18 PMNever heard of em, but RIP.

It's a Gen-X thing...

Quote from: JKnightandKARR on Oct 28, 2026, 10:20 PMI saw that on FB, tis the truth, just think ST:TNG is already starting. I think woman who did Diana's mom/the computer voice passed

Majel Barrett was Troi's mother and also the computer voice. BUT, she was also in the original pilot of Star Trek as Number One (to Captain Christopher Pike).

Quote from: Chris Savage on Oct 27, 2026, 10:42 PMMy wife sent me this in the wake of this news. It's sad, but I think a great tribute to them as well.

You cannot view this attachment.

I saw that on FB, tis the truth, just think ST:TNG is already starting. I think woman who did Diana's mom/the computer voice passed

Never heard of em, but RIP.

Is anyone interested and available to read the article for this project and let me know if you find any issues? Spelling / grammar, consistency, etc. I'm looking for someone (or multiple people) who can go through this article and give me feedback. I've made a lot of changes since the original. This is especially difficult because the original unit is long gone.

There is one section, not ready yet, under the heading, "Door Adjustment". That can be ignored for now. It requires updates to code that I was going to do this weekend. Any takers?