#techav

techav 2025 Recap:

I had quite a year! I worked on some great projects and accomplished far more than I ever could have imagined.

Blog Stats

50 original posts & 6 reblogged posts

18 photo dump posts

11 Wrap030 project updates

10 PikaPC project updates

Over 2000 notes on original posts

I've never been one for regular updates, but I am quite proud of the fact that I managed to publish new posts 48 out of 52 weeks.

Milestones & Accomplishments

I reached the 10th anniversary of my first homebrew computer.

I finally started using git properly for personal projects.

I made some major progress on Wrap030, my 68030 homebrew computer:

Recovered from a disaster that burned up several chips including a CPU

Built an 8-port serial card

Added a programmable timer interrupt

Moved from SRAM to DRAM

Added disk bootloader to ROM

Updated MultiBASIC, my minimal multi-user operating system kernel to use pre-emptive multitasking and hardware memory protection, and to add disk access

I made it surprisingly far into running the latest release of the NetBSD operating system on Wrap030, making it as far as booting into a single-user root shell.

I exhibited and was on staff for VCF Southwest, helping with graphic design for marketing, badges, & t-shirts, and with running the show.

I started PikaPC, my new PowerPC homebrew computer:

Hand-wired the main board and got the initial hardware running

Got PPCForth running and ported an integer Mandelbrot renderer to Forth

Added a PS/2 keyboard & mouse interface

Wired in an S3 ViRGE video chip and got as far as initializing VGA text mode

And of course in the background are all the every-day life events that don't really fit the topic of this blog, like replacing all of the drives in my home server, remodeling my laundry room, (mostly) recovering from a major depressive episode, completing over 50 programming projects for my day job, listening to over a month of music (mostly metal), etc. I guess I've been busy.