Ship the Virtus Console. Demo video. Write-up. The closing-bridge lecture maps every CSA-101 skill forward into CSA-201, CON-101, and RE-101.
Reading
- Capstone spec. CAPSTONE.md. Re-read carefully; this week you ship to its requirements
- The ladder closes. worksheets/ch12/csa-101-ladder-closes.md, the reflective close
- Optional re-reading. Petzold's closing paragraph (Ch 25, p. 382). One more time, aloud
Lecture
Two lectures this week. The orientation talk at the start and the bridge talk at the end.
Part 1: Capstone orientation (~30 min, week start)
- The capstone is one Virtus Console build, end to end
- The grading rubric (per the worksheet template) values working hardware over pretty hardware; a clear write-up over an ornate write-up
- Plan: 6-8 hours hardware tuning; 4-6 hours OS-program polish; 2-3 hours write-up; 1 hour demo video
- Pitfalls: don't try to add new features in capstone week; ship what you have
Part 2: Closing bridge (~90 min, week end)
The bridge talk maps CSA-101 skills forward to the three direct successor courses.
- CSA-201 (Advanced Computer Architecture). Full RV32I. MMU. PMP. Driver track. CSA-101 graduates arrive at CSA-201 already comfortable with RV32I-Lite; CSA-201 extends through the rest of the ISA, adds memory management, and introduces the privilege model
- CON-101 (Virtus Console). Game development on the platform you just built. SNES-cousin controllers; sprite engine; audio engine. CSA-101 capstone is the hardware; CON-101 builds the game-development culture on top
- RE-101 (Reverse Engineering of Embedded Systems). Lab target is the Motorola SB6141 cable modem. CSA-101 Ch 5 silicon bring-up is the prerequisite instinct; CSA-101 Ch 4 hand-encoding fluency is the prerequisite skill; CSA-101 Ch 6/6a/10 toolchain ownership is the analytical fulcrum
- The throughline. Every CSA-101 graduate carries one specific instinct forward: I built it. The next course's hardware, toolchain, or target is no longer mysterious; it is just the next thing to take apart
Labs (~5 hours total, capstone delivery)
This week the labs are the capstone delivery itself.
Lab 14.1: Polish and verify. Re-test every Virtus OS service. Re-test the capstone program on a fresh bitstream flash. Confirm reproducibility.
Lab 14.2: Record the demo video. 60-90 seconds. Show the Virtus Console booting, the capstone program running, one or two notable features. Voice-over optional; clarity over production value.
Lab 14.3: Write the capstone write-up. Follow the spec in CAPSTONE.md. Sections: what works, what doesn't, what's next, what surprised you, what you would do differently.
Independent practice
This week the independent-practice budget folds into capstone delivery work.
Reflection prompts
- Week 1 you held a flashlight bulb and called it a Boolean circuit. Week 14 you shipped a working game console. Describe the moment in the course when "I'm building a CPU" stopped feeling abstract
- The ladder is closed but the climb continues. Which next course are you taking and why?
- Petzold wrote CODE in 1999. The first edition is older than most of the academy's pilot-cohort students. What stayed timeless about Petzold's book across those 27 years?
What's next
After the capstone is shipped, your next CSA-101 cohort obligation is done. Where you take the skills next is your choice. The bridge lecture surfaces the three immediate options (CSA-201, CON-101, RE-101); there are several other downstream tracks (AI-101, AI-201, AI-301; WIR-101, WIR-201; PEN-101; ADV-101, ADV-102; the AI security and adversarial tracks). The academy welcomes you in whichever lane you pick.
Week 14 v0.1. The closing week. Save the capstone artifacts; they are real work.