Saturday, September 17, 2016

Developing better testing and debugging functions

XEROX ALTO - DIABLO DISK TOOL CREATION

To make debugging easier, I embarked on two directions at the same time. One was to build in a test pattern generator, using spare I/O pins and some of the sizeable unused gates on the fpga. The other was to route key internal state out through 32 external I/O pins on the PMOD connectors of the board, in addition to whatever I can display via the eight LEDs and four 7-segment displays.

My test pattern generator now emits index and sector marks at the timing of a real disk drive. It produces the read data clock pulses at 600ns separation. Now, I have to work out a way to emit a realistic sector worth of read data pulses spaced directly in between the clock pulses at the appropriate timing.

The PMOD connectors now have the word that is extracted by the deserializer from the string of disk bits, along with the memory strobe pulse that triggers the writing of the value into RAM. I also plan to output the state of the key state machines involved in reading.




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