Projects

[ Chris Fallin ]

This is a lot of really old, outdated stuff from undergrad or before. As a PhD student, I now give approximately 115% of my time to research. I still write a lot of nifty software, but it's within the walled garden of our microarchitectural simulators, compiler stages and other fun things. Peruse these catacombs of times past at your own peril.

• undergrad research: I worked on Face Recognition problems in CVRL at Notre Dame, culminating in my undergrad thesis.
  
  
• speck, the small, portable, efficiently-coded kernel: a hobby in later middle school. Mostly useless except as a toy. It runs on bare x86 and implements preemptive multitasking, message passing, and dynamic kernel-module loading.
  
  This one holds a special place for me because it sort of brought me to where I am today. While most kids were out becoming normal people at age 12—14 or so, I stayed inside and learned x86 assembly, C, and cut my teeth on systems programming by doing it. (Everything should make sense now if you've ever met me...) I used to hang around on Usenet a lot, mostly alt.os.development (here I am!), where I learned a bunch of this stuff.
  
  
• undergrad comparch tidbits: a pipelined CPU in Verilog, dynamic translation firmware for a custom ISA implementing a stack-based machine on RISC hardware, and some system-level tools (simulators, assemblers) from the Computer Architecture two-semester sequence at ND in 2007-2008. Mostly a curiosity, though the pipelined core might prove useful to someone.
  
  
• digilight, a microcontroller-based low voltage halogen lighting system controlled via DMX, a standard lighting-control protocol.
  
  
• pong (tarball), an implementation of the classic game of Pong in hardware for a Digilent FPGA board with a Xilinx Spartan3E FPGA. It displays to a VGA monitor and takes input from a PS/2 keyboard.
  
  
• sudoku solver (and tutorial-style writeup), a little toy in Python that took me a few hours. Circa junior year of high school (2005). It uses a recursive backtracking algorithm. In practice, solves most puzzles nearly instantaneously. The writeup was written as part of a mini-project for my high school math teacher (and I would write it much differently now, with more background in algorithms/CS!).
  
  
• Lots more that never really become useful to the outside world.