After 2 hours of wiring/debugging/rewiring, I have my EEPROM programmer halfway done. Currently is only able to read locations in memory. Next step: make it programmable.

(For those of you who dont know, EEPROM stands for Electrically Erasable, Programmable Read-Only Memory

Anyone who remembers my last rant about getting fake chips might enjoy this.

After realizing that the EEPROMs I got last time were counterfeit, I bought a new set (and different model) from Atmel. They were super easy to hook up, and the best part is they actually work! Behold, my bit-by-bit EEPROM programmer:

Fuck you, you motherfucking fuck. How DARE you have the capacity to sell fake fucking chips on Amazon and make me fucking waste hours of my god damn fucking nights trying to program your shitty, lazy-ass implementation of an EEPROM.

I followed the datasheet specs down to the fucking microsecond just to find that nothing would write to the chip, and then spent hours of my goddamn life trying to figure out what I was doing wrong, making myself feel like a fucking failure for not being able to write 1s and 0s to a few pins. Fuck you, fuck you with a giant horse cock with needles on the tip

Most successful project... What is success?

My first computer at 8 years old was a Commodore64. There was no internet yet, so I used the manual to learn about BASIC and assembly, sound and sprite registers, and created a pretty elaborate RPG. Mostly text, some sprite art, soldered some eeprom cartridges, optimized the code. Spent almost a year on it. An enthousiast magazine picked up on it, revised, QA'ed & published the game, sold a little over 10k samples. I got ƒ0.25 per sale, and I was completely overwhelmed how much candy one could buy for ƒ2500 ($2k corrected for inflation).

More recent:
I was employee #3 at my current company, started when it was worth nothing and the website redirected to a set of Google Forms containing all the logic. I wrote a large part of the first, monolithic backend.

Now there's teams in a dozen countries, and an estimated revenue of a quarter billion.

So obviously my current "project" is more successful.

Still, my current job sucks, the company turned into a desolate passion-free wasteland full of soulless fake hipster zombies and managers who seem to derive sexual pleasure from holding extremely ineffective meetings, endlessly rubbing their calendars together in their bureaucratic orgy of ineptitude.

So, I'm more proud of my C64 game.

My dad asked a facebook group for help decoding a calibration script I wrote for the new 3D printer, instead of just asking me, and every single person yelled at him that "oh that's so dangerous if you didn't write it yourself don't run it, if you can't manually write gcode sell your printer" etc.

why are these groups always full of degenerate assholes? (and why do they legitimately think calibrating a printer has to be done by manually writing bits to the EEPROM with a needle, or it's not worth having a printer?)

Task: blinking light.

Boomers: One lightbulb, one bimetallic strip.

Zoomers: LED (D13), Atmega328P, Atmega328, 5V, 16MHz, 2KB SRAM, 32KB flash, 1KB EEPROM, FT232RL, 19.0mm x 43.18mm, 16 analog pins, 14 digital I/O pins, 6 PWM pins, 2 resettable fuses, 8MHz external crystal, 16MHz external crystal, 12MHz crystal, 0.5mm pitch, 0.1 inch headers, 1.27mm pitch headers, mini-USB, 3.3V regulator, 5V regulator, 16MHz ceramic resonator, 1N5819 Schottky diode, 47uF capacitor, 100uF capacitor, 10uF capacitor, 100nF capacitor, 0.1uF capacitor, 22pF capacitor, 1N4007 diode, 10K resistor, 4.7K resistor, 330 ohm resistor, 10uH inductor, 27 ohm resistor, 2x3 ICSP header, reset button, LED (D13), green LED, red LED, yellow LED, 6-pin header, 8-pin header, 28-pin DIP socket, 6-pin FTDI header, ceramic resonator, USB mini-B socket, 16MHz oscillator, M7 diode, LDO voltage regulator, 3.3V regulator, 5V voltage regulator, polyfuse, 22pF capacitors, 100nF capacitors, 10uF capacitors, 47uF capacitors, 100uF capacitors, 1N4007 diode, 1N5819 Schottky diode, 16MHz resonator, 0.1uF capacitor, 330 ohm resistors, 27 ohm resistors, 4.7K resistor, 10K resistor, 10uH inductor, 22pF capacitor, mini-USB connector, 8-pin header, 6-pin header, 2x3 ICSP header, reset button, ceramic resonator.

Writing simple driver for AT24C256 eeprom on pico (RP2040)

It turned out it was FT24C256A, which should follow same protocol.

After literally over month of coming back to it, getting stuck again, rewriting things (including some functions of pico-sdk), i almost gave up a d started just yolo trying random shit.

Afterall the documentation on addressing the chip fucking missled me -_- (1st bit is r/w flag and 2-7 bits are address, counted from MSB->LSB)

I made it work yesterday.

In meantime Ive rewritten Wire library, Ive modified someone's else rewrite, extended sdk to allow getting i2c registers, tried to use tiny go just to learn it doesnt support i2c slave mode, resoldered entire thing few times, measured connections few too many times etc.

Frustrated I doubted I will ever manage to finish putting this project together because it looked like Im just too noob.

concept: a PCI/PCI-e/SATA/IDE device allowing for booting from a "HDD" which is, in reality, EPROM. Not EEPROM, EPROM. For purposes of, say, having an uninfectable copy of HBCD 15.2 or HBCD 10 PE you can insert and forget about without consuming a USB slot or disc drive.

In Italian we call ROM the Roma ethnic group.

Italian premier wants a census of this people.

Today I found this comic strip.

"From now CD and DVD will be no more ROM"

"ROM will be called Read Only Memory"

"EEPROM will be called EEP"