🚀 go-pugleaf

Hello all.

I am a lecturer here at Queensland Uni.  I have assigned one of the 
4th year students in my care the thesis topic of porting gnuchess (or
the like) to an embedded microcontroller.  Specifically the Hitachi SH1
- 7032, a 32bit RISC chip.  I thought it wouldn't be too hard.  Maybe I
was wrong.  Initially I just wanted him to be able to run gnuchess on
the microcontroller, intereracting with it on a text terminal connected
to its serial port.  Subsequently, I hoped he could start modifying the
code to accept input from sensors around a real chess board, and give
its output as LEDs on the rows and columns of a real board.

The micro on the eval board can run with 256kbyte of RAM, which
initially will hold both code and data.  I'm pretty sure this should be
ok if we remove a lot of the codebooks etc - yes?
So a couple of questions...

Has anyone already done this - and is willing to share the results - for
any microcontroller.  Even just the first bit.  I know of a simple chess
computer which runs entirely from internal memory (single chip mode) on
a 68HC705C8, by a Tasmanian here called Ian Mitchell.  It was presented
as a project in Electronics Australia.  The whole lot fitted into a
matchbox.  I'm about to try to contact him now.  

Anyone have some recommended reading for us?

Does it seem feasable?  I can't see why not.  Comments?

Many thanks,
	Geoff.
-- 
 Geoff Walker           Power/Electronics    walkerg@csee.uq.edu.au
 Dept. Comp Sci & Electrical Engineering         ph. +617 3365 3573    
 University of Queensland                        fax +617 3365 4999
 St Lucia AUSTRALIA 4072         http://www.elec.uq.edu.au/~walkerg/