A Level Computing Science Project: Car Burglar Alarm

My A Level Computing Science project was 6502-based single board computer. I designed all the hardware myself and wrote the operating system from scratch. The project was implemented as a car burglar alarm: upon entering the car, one has three chances (or 30 seconds) to enter the correct code number on the numeric keypad before the alarm sounds. Opening the hood or the trunk results in the alarm being triggered immediately. The intention is also that the ignition is disabled until the alarm has been disabled. Obviously, for the sake of this project, the outputs were just LEDs.

This is the project report I wrote back in 1987. I wrote most of it on my BBC Micro using Acornsoft’s VIEW wordprocessor, which was then printed on my Epson FX80 dot matrix printer; the diagrams and flowcharts were drawn by hand—a very tedious process!

Rather than just scan in my original project report, I decided to typeset it using groff and its accompanying tools, like pic and tbl. To do that I scanned in the report, and converted it to a text file (unfortunately, my original files from this project have long been lost to the raveges of time). I then entered suitable groff directives to generate a new, clean PDF.

I took the opportunity to re-draw the figures using pic, but decided that redoing the flowcharts just wasn’t worth my effort. Who uses flowcharts these days anyway?! I also had to re-enter all the source code, but fortunately there isn’t a great deal of that.

There’re a few cringeworthy things in the project report, but remember that the target audience was my Computing Science teacher, Terry “Right You Blokes” Fish. I fixed a couple of typos that I found while re-typesetting this document, but let me know if you find any others.

Here’s a link to the project’s source code, which, like the project documentation itself, is available under the Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license. Enjoy!