Entries posted in July 2019

I upgrade the first of my personal machines to Debian's new stable release, buster, yesterday. So far two minor niggles, but nothing major.

My hosts are controlled, sometimes, by puppet. The puppet-master is running stretch and has puppet 4.8.2 installed. After upgrading my test-host to the new stable I discovered it has puppet 5.5 installed:

root@git ~ # puppet --version
5.5.10

I was not sure if there would be compatibility problems, but after reading the release notes nothing jumped out. Things seemed to work, once I fixed this immediate problem:

 # puppet agent --test
 Warning: Unable to fetch my node definition, but the agent run will continue:
 Warning: SSL_connect returned=1 errno=0 state=error: dh key too small
 Info: Retrieving pluginfacts
 ..

This error-message was repeated multiple times:

SSL_connect returned=1 errno=0 state=error: dh key too small

To fix this comment out the line in /etc/ssl/openssl.cnf which reads:

CipherString = DEFAULT@SECLEVEL=2

The second problem was that I use borg to run backups, once per day on most systems, and twice per day on others. I have an invocation which looks like this:

borg create ${flags} --compression=zlib  --stats ${dest}${self}::$(date +%Y-%m-%d-%H:%M:%S) \
   --exclude=/proc \
   --exclude=/swap.file \
   --exclude=/sys  \
   --exclude=/run  \
   --exclude=/dev  \
   --exclude=/var/log \
   /

That started to fail :

borg: error: unrecognized arguments: /

I fixed this by re-ordering the arguments such that it ended "destination path", and changing --exclude=x to --exclude x:

borg create ${flags} --compression=zlib  --stats \
   --exclude /proc \
   --exclude /swap.file \
   --exclude /sys  \
   --exclude /run  \
   --exclude /dev  \
   --exclude /var/log \
   ${dest}${self}::$(date +%Y-%m-%d-%H:%M:%S)  /

That approach works on my old and new hosts.

I'll leave this single system updated for a few more days to see what else is broken, if anything. Then I'll upgrade them in turn.

Good job!

Tags: borg, buster, debian, puppet | No comments

I've been tinkering with hardware for a couple of years now, most of this is trivial stuff if I'm honest, for example:

• Wiring a display to a WiFi-enabled ESP8266 device.
  • Making it fetch data over the internet and display it.
• Hooking up a temperature/humidity sensor to a device.
  • Submit readings to an MQ bus.

Off-hand I think the most complex projects I've built have been complex in terms of software. For example I recently hooked up a 933Mhz radio-receiver to an ESP8266 device, then had to reverse engineer the protocol of the device I wanted to listen for. I recorded a radio-burst using an SDR dongle on my laptop, broke the transmission into 1 and 0 manually, worked out the payload and then ported that code to the ESP8266 device.

Anyway I've decided I should do something more complex, I should build "a computer". Going old-school I'm going to stick to what I know best the Z80 microprocessor. I started programming as a child with a ZX Spectrum which is built around a Z80.

Initially I started with BASIC, later I moved on to assembly language mostly because I wanted to hack games for infinite lives. I suspect the reason I don't play video-games so often these days is because I'm just not very good without cheating ;)

Anyway the Z80 is a reasonably simple processor, available in a 40PIN DIP format. There are the obvious connectors for power, ground, and a clock-source to make the thing tick. After that there are pins for the address-bus, and pins for the data-bus. Wiring up a standalone Z80 seems to be pretty trivial.

Of course making the processor "go" doesn't really give you much. You can wire it up, turn on the power, and barring explosions what do you have? A processor executing NOP instructions with no way to prove it is alive.

So to make a computer I need to interface with it. There are two obvious things that are required:

• The ability to get your code on the thing.
  • i.e. It needs to read from memory.
• The ability to read/write externally.
  • i.e. Light an LED, or scan for keyboard input.

I'm going to keep things basic at the moment, no pun intended. Because I have no RAM, because I have no ROM, because I have no keyboard I'm going to .. fake it.

The Z80 has 40 pins, of which I reckon we need to cable up over half. Only the arduino mega has enough pins for that, but I think if I use a Mega I can wire it to the Z80 then use the Arduino to drive it:

• That means the Arduino will generate a clock-signal to make the Z80 tick.
• The arduino will monitor the address-bus
  • When the Z80 makes a request to read the RAM at address 0x0000 it will return something from its memory.
  • When the Z80 makes a request to write to the RAM at address 0xffff it will store it away in its memory.
• Similarly I can monitor for requests for I/O and fake that.

In short the Arduino will run a sketch with a 1024 byte array, which the Z80 will believe is its memory. Via the serial console I can read/write to that RAM, or have the contents hardcoded.

I thought I was being creative with this approach, but it seems like it has been done before, numerous times. For example:

• http://baltazarstudios.com/arduino-zilog-z80/
• https://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=60739.0
• https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/2070/wiring-a-zilog-z80

Anyway I've ordered a bunch of Z80 chips, and an Arduino mega (since I own only one Arduino, I moved on to ESP8266 devices pretty quickly), so once it arrives I'll document the process further.

Once it works I'll need to slowly remove the arduino stuff - I guess I'll start by trying to build an external RAM/ROM interface, or an external I/O circuit. But basically:

• Hook the Z80 up to the Arduino such that I can run my own code.
• Then replace the arduino over time with standalone stuff.

The end result? I guess I have no illusions I can connect a full-sized keyboard to the chip, and drive a TV. But I bet I could wire up four buttons and an LCD panel. That should be enough to program a game of Tetris in Z80 assembly, and declare success. Something like that anyway :)

Expect part two to appear after my order of parts arrives from China.

Tags: computer-building, z80 | No comments

My previous post on the subject of building a Z80-based computer briefly explained my motivation, and the approach I was going to take.

This post describes my progress so far:

• On the hardware side, zero progress.
• On the software-side, lots of fun.

To recap I expect to wire a Z80 microprocessor to an Arduino (mega). The arduino will generate a clock-signal which will make the processor "tick". It will also react to read/write attempts that the processor makes to access RAM, and I/O devices.

The Z80 has a neat system for requesting I/O, via the use of the IN and OUT instructions which allow the processor to read/write a single byte to one of 255 connected devices.

To experiment, and for a memory recap I found a Z80 assembler, and a Z80 disassembler, both packaged for Debian. I also found a Z80 emulator, which I forked and lightly-modified.

With the appropriate tools available I could write some simple code. I implemented two I/O routines in the emulator, one to read a character from STDIN, and one to write to STDOUT:

IN A, (1)   ; Read a character from STDIN, store in A-register.
OUT (1), A  ; Write the character in A-register to STDOUT

With those primitives implemented I wrote a simple script:

;
;  Simple program to upper-case a string
;
org 0
   ; show a prompt.
   ld a, '>'
   out (1), a
start:
   ; read a character
   in a,(1)
   ; eof?
   cp -1
   jp z, quit
   ; is it lower-case?  If not just output it
   cp 'a'
   jp c,output
   cp 'z'
   jp nc, output
   ; convert from lower-case to upper-case.  yeah.  math.
   sub a, 32
output:
   ; output the character
   out (1), a
   ; repeat forever.
   jr start
quit:
   ; terminate
   halt

With that written it could be compiled:

 $ z80asm ./sample.z80 -o ./sample.bin

Then I could execute it:

 $ echo "Hello, world" | ./z80emulator ./sample.bin
 Testing "./sample.bin"...
 >HELLO, WORLD

 1150 cycle(s) emulated.

And that's where I'll leave it for now. When I have the real hardware I'll hookup some fake-RAM containing this program, and code a similar I/O handler to allow reading/writing to the arduino's serial-console. That will allow the same code to run, unchanged. That'd be nice.

I've got a simple Z80-manager written, but since I don't have the chips yet I can only compile-test it. We'll see how well I did soon enough.

Tags: computer-building, z80 | 3 comments