kmod's blog

I’ve seen this question come up a couple times, most recently on the python-dev mailing list.  When you want to benchmark something, you naturally want to run the workload multiple times.  But what is the best way to aggregate the multiple measurements?  The two common ways are to take the minimum of them, and to […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]