After a crash course on the FORTH programming language, extending the compiler, directly addressing system registers and assembly code we were unleashed to develop our own project in forth.
We located a 32 x 16 LED dot matrix display intended for use with an arduino (Link) with basically no hardware documentation and set to work. Dedicated project sub-site here.
Our group (Joseph Eric Roy, Stefanie Schmidiger and myself) started by creating a memory addressing system (table of arrays) and wrote a function to show the intended DMD pattern on the console. From this point the high level functions (scrolling, fonts, graphics, etc) were developed in parallel with the low level functions (interrupts, data transfer, multiplexing, dimming, etc).
PresentationThe console based simulator can be seen below, for more information check out the sub-site.