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What’s happening on Pyston
People sometimes ask me how Pyston is going and what we’re currently working on. It’s a bit hard to answer, both because we haven’t had a release recently with some headline-worthy features, but also because a lot of the stuff we’re working on is individually pretty small. Sometimes I try to find some sort of way […]
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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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Pyston 0.2 released
We’ve been working very hard over the past few months, and I’m very proud to “release” version 0.2. I set up a shiny new dedicated Pyston blog, and you can see the announcement here: http://blog.pyston.org/2014/09/11/9/ I’m putting “release” in quotes since we’re not distributing binaries due to the “early access” nature, and in fact the v0.2 […]
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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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Bitcoin vulnerability exploited
http://www.wired.com/2014/08/isp-bitcoin-theft/ Looks like this is an implementation of what I described previously. This guy used BGP to route internet traffic to him — the article is light on the technical details but my guess is that he masqueraded as a popular bitcoin pool and gave out orders that benefited him rather than the real pool. The […]
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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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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 […]