Capstone week. You ship the artefact you have been building since Module 7. The homebrew ROM, the modified core, the five-minute demo, the written report. The grading happens against the rubric in CAPSTONE.html.
Reading
- Re-read CAPSTONE.html in week 9 so the Week-10 sprint is against a clear target.
- Optional: scan the cohort capstones from prior cohorts in the academy archive (instructor will share the URL).
Lecture
Roughly three hours across two sessions. Key arc:
- Capstone scope review. Tier 1 versus Tier 2 versus Tier 3 in CAPSTONE.html.
- The demo discipline. What to show in five minutes and what to skip.
- The report discipline. What modification you made, why you made it, what you read.
- Reproducibility. Your README has to let a stranger rebuild the artefact.
- The cohort showcase. Live demos in front of your peers.
Lab pack
Lab Pack 10 is the capstone delivery package. See Lab Pack 10: Capstone Delivery.
Classroom tools
- Whichever subset of the course-wide tool corpus you actually used.
- Your student repo as the deliverable container.
- OBS (or your screen-recorder of choice) for the demo capture.
Architecture comparison sidebar
CSA-101's capstone was a complete CPU on FPGA running a hand-assembled program. CON-101's capstone is a complete game on a modified core. Same shape, different scale. The pattern repeats in CSA-201 (a real OS), RE-101 (a real cable-modem exploit), RF-201 (a real SDR pipeline).
Reflection prompts
- What did you choose to modify in your core and why?
- What did you choose to leave alone in your core and why?
- If you had another two weeks, what would you add to the homebrew ROM?
What is next
RE-101 picks up the cousin-mapping diagram you wrote in Module 9 and points it at firmware. If you finished CON-101 well, RE-101 is the natural next step.