Finally, the m68hc12 card has arrived. It is neat, fast and good-looking. Bundled with a good manual, it was easy to start with the development. I have already downloaded and modified the ermat program to the chip, and to my great surprise it worked perfectly from the beginning. However, it was extremely slow thanks to a stupid compiler (at least I think). I rewrote the syncdata() function, and somehow it sped up about a hundred times. Funny.

If we are using one image per degree of the display, it can output 3,7 Hz of monitor update frequency. This is too low, of course, so we will probably reduce the “phi-resolution” (a new term invented by me) to one image each fifth degree. This would give us 20 Hz, which is OK for our purposes. In a real product, this speed must increase, of course; but this is only a prototype.