A major milestone passed tonight......... (only took 35 years)

I downloaded CodeBlocks for Windows - so now I can use gcc and g++ to compile and run C and C++ on my laptop.

I got Marcel's van Kervinck's Gigatron Simulator gtemu.c to run on the laptop, and I am now porting gtemu across to a 400MHz STM32H743 Nucleo board - programmed with the Arduino IDE.

I'm not really a strong programmer - it's taken 10 slog to get off "first base" with C - and if you don't do it everyday for a living, it soon evaporates from the grey matter.

Now that I can write some scungy code on the laptop and port it to the STM32H743 Nucleo target board, I can start to make some progress......



Remotivated,


Ken

Well done! For me, there does seem to be a hump to get started with a new skill outside my comfort zone. In fact, a hump to get started with anything. It's something of a learning curve, and something of a potential barrier. Having the confidence to fail, and fail again, in the process of learning, is probably part of it.

Yeah, good luck!

And whatever you are doing with your STM32H473 - even a dumb parallel output requires its clock (!) to be enabled first.

I have a hardware background - mostly pcb design with ARM devices for about the last 5 years. I can write enough C code to set up an STM32 and get it running - but mostly, these days, applications like STM CubeMX generate most of the low level peripheral support code for you.

When I left University I had written some Fortran on a VAX-11 and some assembly language on an 8088 - neither really useful these days! I certainly could no have earned a living writing firmware - I generally leave that to those that know what they are doing.

I tinkered with PIC assembly and wrote a whole bunch of routines to send and receive DTMF and modem tones - but PIC assembler is not fun. I got back into code when the Arduino came into common usage and I was impressed how much progress I could make with relatively small effort in coding. Now with powerful ARM processors incorporated into the Arduino IDE - I can do those same tasks - only at about 100 X execution speed.

I had held off from coding in C on the PC - because I wrongly believed that the toolchains were difficult to use - not ever having been taught or had need to use them. Having watched a YouTube video tutorial for CodeBlocks, and seen how easy it was to get something compiled and running with gcc - I decided to bite the bullet. With that first hurdle over, I can now start thinking about simple assembler and disassemblers.



Ken