Dmitry Grinberg is an embedded engineer who documents hardware hacks, such as running Linux on an 8-bit microcontroller and Palm OS on other devices.
Commenters call his projects amazing and very cool, and praise the pages as a good source of information on small microcontrollers and emulation.
Making a PoC is usually only the beginning. Firmware upgrades for microcontrollers may be difficult to do in the field, without UART and JTAG debugging. If clients expect that pretty demos will continue working, they might be quite disappointed. It's better to follow good design patterns (Active Objects, state machines [1]) from the start when possible.
dmitrygr is a legendary embedded hacker [2]: his Transcend WiFi SD card reverse-engineering is what led to me having a PQI Air Card in my pocket, and he's also written a bit-banged Bluetooth Low Energy driver. Great for a demo or when there's nothing else available, but far from a finished product.
Writing a MISRA-compliant BLE driver would make me MISRA BLE.
[1] https://embeddedgurus.com/state-space/2016/04/beyond-the-rtos-a-better-way-to-design-real-time-embedded-software/
[2] http://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects
Man. I've never been to defcon, but it's been more than a passing curiosity ever since the first real announcement[0] crossed my BBS in '93.
And recently I've had a string of bad, unalterable, and irrevocably-permanent events occur in my life. And yet, I'm very pleased to say that your write-up on your experiences with the RP2350[1] presented a small but meaningfully-positive thing for me to look forward to.
Please be well -- and don't take any guff from these swine[2].
[0] https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%201/DEF%20CON%201%20announce.txt
[1] https://dmitry.gr/?r=06.%20Thoughts&proj=11.%20RP2350
[2] https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/fear-and-loathing-in-las-vegas-hunter-s-thompson/1002088488
> "They are the output of non-deterministic matrix multiplication operations"
Just a nit-pick: Aren't neural networks and LLMs perfectly deterministic?
I think you can reproduce GPT-4 perfectly if you have access to the same source code, training data, and the seeds for the random number generators that they used?
As a side note, I think it'd be theoretically possible to do this on a small 8-bit microcontroller given enough time and external storage. That's the beauty of Turing machines.
This would not be practical in the least. But it sure was cool seeing a guy boot Linux in just 3.5 hours on a small 8-bit AVR microcontroller.
https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=07.%20Linux%20on%208bit
From https://www.tech-pubs.net/wiki/IRIX_101 -
> Why are machines that run IRIX expensive?
> There are no new machines being produced, and high-end machines are in short supply. Less expensive machines can be had. We do not recommend using eBay to search, as the prices are usually extremely inflated.
Less expensive machines can be had on the non-eBay used market, or have we hit the point where the cheapest way to have such a machine is dedicated emulation like https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=33.%20LinuxCard ?
I knew that someone did that (not the link you posted though) but I meant real world usable applications. Someone also managed to run Linux on a 8bit AVR microcontroller by writing a 32bit ARM emulator then adding an old SIMM memory module and a SD card for storage. Not real world usable as well, but that one brings the "because we can" concept to new levels:)
https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=07.+Linux+on+8bit
I was thinking "this looks awfully familiar", and was going to link http://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=33.%20LinuxCard, but it turns out that the code is directly based on that!
For anyone interested, it's still very worth visiting that link, as it describes the whole journey and technical details about how the original DECstation emulation code came to be.