Category: electronics
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Xilinx Zynq: Initial Impressions
I’ve been passively watching the FPGA space for the past few years. Partially because I think they’re a really interesting technology, but also because, as The Next Platform says: [T]here are clear signs that the FPGA is set to become a compelling acceleration story over the next few years. From the relatively recent Intel acquisition…
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Fray Trace: an FPGA raytracer
There’s a cool-looking competition being held right now, called The Hackaday Prize. I originally tried to do this super-ambitious custom-SBC project — there’s no writeup yet but you can see some photos of the pcbs here — but it’s looking like that’s difficult enough that it’s not going to happen in time. So instead I’ve decided…
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Video: someone routing a full ARM SOM
I have no idea how to judge the quality of this work, but I thought the video was still very interesting: it’s a time-lapse video of someone routing a relatively-complicated ARM system-on-module. I found it interesting because I think it’s always instructive to see how other people work, which is something that I haven’t been…
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JTAG programmer optimizations
In a recent post I talked about my first custom FPGA board and trying to get it up and running; the summary was that 1) my custom jtag programmer didn’t work right away with the FPGA, and 2) my jtag programming setup is very slow. I solved the first problem in that past, and spent a…
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First FPGA board: it’s all about JTAG
Well, I finally sort-of accomplished one of my original goals: designing and building a custom FPGA board. The reason it took a while, and somewhat separately also the reason I can’t use it very much, are both due to JTAG issues. Here’s a picture in all its low-res glory: Without getting too much into the…
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BGA update: first successes!
As the title suggests, I successfully reflowed my first BGA chips today. I followed the seemingly-easy steps from the last post, and the board correctly enumerated! In a decent bit of thinking ahead, I not only connected the JTAG pins to the header, but I also paired up all CPLD IOs so that I could…
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BGA update: some good news, mostly bad
I blogged a couple times about how I was attempting to do BGA soldering at home using my toaster oven. The last post ended with me being stumped, so I create a few new boards: one with 3.3V JTAG circuitry in case that the previous 1.8V JTAG was the issue — while I had designed my…
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More BGA testing
In my previous post I talked about my first attempts at some BGA soldering. I ran through all three of my test chips, and ordered some more; they came in recently, so a took another crack at it. I went back to using liquid flux, since I find it easier to use (the felt-tip flux…
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First trials with BGA parts
So I decided to try my hand at BGA reflow; this is something I’ve wanted to do for awhile, and recently I read about some people having success with it so I decided to give it a shot. I’m trying to start moving up the high-speed ladder to things like larger FPGAs, DRAM, or flash…
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Followup: picking an ARM chip
In my last post I talked a little about the process of picking an ARM microcontroller to start using. After doing some more research, I’ve decided for now to start using the STM32 line of chips. I don’t really know how it stands on the technical merits vs the other similar lines; the thing I’m…
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