Beau Wilkinson

This is the home page of BeauWilkinson.

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 / OpenGauge? – 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 DirectMemoryAccess? circuit for the Heathkit ET-3400 computer as well.

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