Category: Uncategorized
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Quick report: Altera vs Xilinx for hobbyists
I’ve done a number of projects involving Xilinx FPGAs and CPLDs, and honestly I’m frustrated with them enough to be interested in trying out one of their competitors. This is pretty rant-y, so take it with a grain of salt but some of my gripes include: Simply awful toolchain support. The standard approach is to…
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Impressed
I remarked to a friend recently that technology seems to increase our expectations faster than it can meet them: “why can’t my pocket-computer get more than 6 hours of battery life” would have seemed like such a surreal complaint 10 years ago. For that reason I want to recognize an experience I had lately that…
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Getting started with STM32 microcontrollers
I was excited to see recently that ARM announced their new Cortex-M7 microcontroller core, and that ST announced their line using that core, the STM32F7. I had briefly played around with the STM32 before, and I talked about how I was going to start using it — I never followed up on that post, but I got…
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Building a single board computer: DRAM soldering issues
Sometimes I start a project thinking it will be about one thing: I thought my FPGA project was going to be about developing my Verilog skills and building a graphics engine, but at least at first, it was primarily about getting JTAG working. (Programming Xilinx FPGAs is actually a remarkably complicated story, typically involving people…
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Thoughts on the “wearables” market
I’ve seen a lot of references to the wearables market lately with a lot of people getting very excited about it. I can’t tell though, is it actually a thing that people will really want? Lots of companies are jumping into it and trying to provide offerings, and the media seems to be taking it…
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The Mill CPU
I’ve seen the Mill CPU come up a number of times — maybe because I subscribed to their updates and so I get emails about their talks. They’re getting a bunch of buzz, but every time I look at their docs or watch their videos, I can’t tell — are they “for real”? They certainly…
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My first — and only — 0201 part
For fun, I put some 0201 capacitors behind a BGA part in this board. I decided to try it, and surprisingly it was possible. Not something I want to do again though.
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DirtyPCBs and OSH Park: comparison
Long story short, I decided to try out an interesting new PCB-manufacturer, dirtypcbs.com. I decided to compare it against my current go-to, OSH Park, so I ran a new 4-layer board of mine through both. The 4-layer service at dirtypcbs was only just launched, and I had to ask Ian to let me in on…
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Playing with OSH Park tolerances
In some of my recent boards, which I will hopefully blog about soon, I decided to add some DRC-violating sections to test how well they would come out. OSH Park has pretty good tolerances — 5/5 trace/space with 10 mil holes and 4 mil annular rings, for their 4-layer boards — but they’re not *quite*…
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Results of GIL experiments in Pyston
Today I decided to end my recent experiments with removing the GIL from Pyston. A couple things happened to prompt me to do this: the non-GIL version is able to beat the GIL-version performance with 2 threads, and profiling is showing that any further work will be fairly involved. I’ve been experimenting with a prototype…
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