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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…
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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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Breaking out the 3D printer again
It’s been almost exactly a year since I first got a 3D printer, and a couple things have conspired recently to convince me to take it off the shelf and try using it again. The most pressing need is for more parts boxes for organizing SMD parts: I use coin envelopes for storing cut strips…
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