New RPL firmware for 50G - Revisited

[Claudio L.]

(02-19-2014 04:01 PM)Tugdual Wrote:  How do you guys start such a project?
I mean for a starting point, what understanding of the official firmware do you have?

Funny you ask, because even though we do collectively have a fairly deep understanding of the internals, we choose NOT to follow them!
We want to "replace" the existing firmware, so why do we need to understand it?
We need to understand the hardware where we will be running, yes, but not the firmware. And we'll try to keep hardware dependency to a minimum, so the project can run on multiple architectures (waaaay out in the future).

(02-19-2014 04:01 PM)Tugdual Wrote:  Are you reverse engineering the existing one?

Not at all. No hp50g will be harmed during this project.
The last thing we want is a "cease and desist" letter from HP, so absolutely not copying anything, not even looking.
The new system will be designed to take advantage of a modern 32-bit architecture, while the original design was done to maximize the benefits of a 4-bit processor. As you can imagine, the best solution to the same problem will be completely different if you have such different architectures.

Claudio