Category: electronics
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New parts!
I just got my orders SparkFun and DigiKey, and now I have a bunch of new toys to play with: Some inverter ICs A small vise to hold boards while soldering A digital oscilloscope kit And a bunch more. To add to the fun, a friend lent me their $600 Metcal soldering station since they weren’t using it;…
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Link: Spartan-6 FPGA PCB Design and Pin Planning Guide
I ran into this very-informative Xilinx user guide about PCB layout; it’s specifically tailored towards people who are interested in mounting a Spartan-6 FPGA on a board, especially for high-speed use, but I found it to be a good introduction to PCB design for high-speed circuits (such as explaining parasitic inductances, how to determine them…
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Microcontroller Project: Analog Edge-Detector
One of the issues I had with my last project is I had bent one of the microcontroller pins when inserting it into the breadboard, and as a result that trace was simply not being driven despite the code being correct. One debugging tool that I think would be useful to have is what I’m calling…
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Microcontroller Project: Digital Faradmeter
Alright, I got my $10 soldering iron today and put together my USB->UART board, and I was finally able to program my Arduino-compatible ATmega328! You can see what I’m messing around with here: I got all the basic Arduino tutorials running, so I decided to try my hand at something a little tougher: a digital…
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Electronics Setup
I’m proud to say that my order from SparkFun arrived today: I got tired pretty quickly of trying to get any work done on my already-crowded computer desk, so pulled the trigger on my plan to make some space in my office for a new workspace, and hire an exec to buy a desk from Ikea.…
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New Projects
I’m not really sure what’s gotten into me lately, but I’ve become very intrigued by the fact that non-professionals like me can build electronic devices that actually do things. Once this new way of thinking has taken over, I’ve noticed all these things that would be cool to build — for instance, as much as…
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Aside: ASIC conversion
The current state of the Bitcoin mining world seems to revolve around new ASIC-based miners that are coming out, such as from Butterfly Labs. These devices seem to be very profitable investments if you can get your hands on one — this calculator says that the $2,499 50GH/s machine should pay itself off itself off in…
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FPGA Bitcoin Miner: Improvements
In my last post, I talked about how I did a basic conversion of my bitcoin mining script into verilog for an fpga. The next thing to do, of course, was to increase the mining speed. But first, a little more detail about how the miner works: Overview of a Bitcoin miner The whole Bitcoin…
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FPGA Bitcoin Miner: First Implementation
So, now that I have a working UART module and a simple bitcoin miner, it’s time to implement SHA256 functionality. Specifically, I’m going to implement the 512-bit per-chunk part of the algorithm, since that seems like a good level of abstraction. There’s some other stuff the algorithm does, such as setting initial values and padding, but in…
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Building a Processor, Part 8: UART Communication
This is part 8 of my Building a Processor series, where I try to build a processor on an FPGA board. This post is about getting the UART peripheral to work so that I can communicate directly between the board and my computer. Previous: further optimizing the debouncer. In my previous post, I brought up the…
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