This is the home page of Beau Wilkinson.
Personal Projects (starting with most recent) Please contact me (beau.wilkinson@gmail.com) if you have interest in any of these…
SFP - A minimal real number type, with implementations for the 6800 family, and for two generations of 8-bit PIC microcontrollers.
Frost – Functional language cross-compiler (Windows - hosted) for Microchip Technology's 8-bit PIC microcontrollers; highlights include a “Swiss Army Knife” half-precision real number type, extensive macro facilities, and full function-call based abstraction over the vagaries of PIC memory segmentation. In particular, the 8-entry PIC call stack is “abstracted away” via automatic use of the register pages.
PIC Control Apps - In addition to the cross-compiler I have designed a variety of PIC applications, including a 2-way multi-drop serial network (physical medium and protocol) and a proportional controller with integrator and transistorized motor driver. Together with some presentation (ANSI terminal) routines these comprise a very basic (but interesting) non-Von-Neumann real-time OS.
ET 3400 DMA – Direct Memory Access application for the Heathkit ET-3400 educational computer; This adds jumper wires, transistors, and other rudimentary components to the ET-3400 such that a button and some DIP switches can be used to edit the contents of RAM. I have developed some documentation concerning this experiment that you may find helpful, e.g. if you do not have the hardware to do the typical Heath Co. courses.
Gaugewerks3D / Open Gauge – These are minimalist (~600 lines of C source each) industrial gauge packages for Direct3D and OpenGL, respectively. Rudimentary hardware (e.g. laptop, industrial PC) is targeted and simplicity and determinism are emphasized throughout.
Burst Mode Line-Drawing Algorithms - Bresenham's algorithm is typically presented as the apotheosis of line rasterization. In actual practice, most contemporary hardware offers multiple pixel burst drawing modes which are not addressed by the Bresenham's (single-pixel) algorithm. My work in this area offers optimal line-drawing algorithms for the burst modes offered by the IBM VGA video device as well as the Tandy Color Computer 2.
SpriteXX – A C++ abstraction of the VGA “Mode X” ubiquitous in PC games in the 1990s; Based on an x86 assembly language core; college thesis; also wrapped by a custom compiler written in C; MS-DOS hosted; Contains a dynamic memory manager for the 256-kilobytes of video memory present on the VGA.
Biography
I am a software developer living in New Orleans, LA, USA. I attended the University of Southern Mississippi and got my BS in Computer Science in 1999.
Outside of computing, I live with my beautiful wife and our two little daughters. In my spare time, I sometimes work on electronics projects. Right now, I am wrapping up a PI controller for a robot I built from a CD-ROM drive. I recently designed a Direct Memory Access circuit for the Heathkit ET-3400 computer as well.
See original on c2.com 