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Pyston FAQ
This is the first time I’ve ever gotten enough questions about something to put together something that can honestly be called an FAQ and not a What-I-Think-You-Might-Want-To-Know; here are some questions that seem to come up often: Why does Pyston target Python 2.7? Pyston is initially targeting Python 2.7 because that’s what Dropbox uses…
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First FPGA board: it’s all about JTAG
Well, I finally sort-of accomplished one of my original goals: designing and building a custom FPGA board. The reason it took a while, and somewhat separately also the reason I can’t use it very much, are both due to JTAG issues. Here’s a picture in all its low-res glory: Without getting too much into the…
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BGA update: first successes!
As the title suggests, I successfully reflowed my first BGA chips today. I followed the seemingly-easy steps from the last post, and the board correctly enumerated! In a decent bit of thinking ahead, I not only connected the JTAG pins to the header, but I also paired up all CPLD IOs so that I could…
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BGA update: some good news, mostly bad
I blogged a couple times about how I was attempting to do BGA soldering at home using my toaster oven. The last post ended with me being stumped, so I create a few new boards: one with 3.3V JTAG circuitry in case that the previous 1.8V JTAG was the issue — while I had designed my…
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Pyston: xrange() example
I’ve finally been able to talk about what I’ve been up to at Dropbox: Pyston, a new JIT for Python! You can check out the main announcement here, or the code here. In this post I wanted to go into more detail about a specific example of something that Pyston can handle: for loops. It…
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Troubles of using GNU Make
There seem to be lots of posts these days about people “discovering” how using build process automation can be a good thing. I’ve always felt like the proliferation of new build tools is largely a result of peoples’ excitement at discovering something new; I’ve always used GNU Make and have always loved it. As I…
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More BGA testing
In my previous post I talked about my first attempts at some BGA soldering. I ran through all three of my test chips, and ordered some more; they came in recently, so a took another crack at it. I went back to using liquid flux, since I find it easier to use (the felt-tip flux…
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First trials with BGA parts
So I decided to try my hand at BGA reflow; this is something I’ve wanted to do for awhile, and recently I read about some people having success with it so I decided to give it a shot. I’m trying to start moving up the high-speed ladder to things like larger FPGAs, DRAM, or flash…
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Followup: picking an ARM chip
In my last post I talked a little about the process of picking an ARM microcontroller to start using. After doing some more research, I’ve decided for now to start using the STM32 line of chips. I don’t really know how it stands on the technical merits vs the other similar lines; the thing I’m…
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Working on an ARM board
Pretty much all the electronics projects I’ve done so far have used AVR ATmega chips as the central microcontrollers. I’ve been meaning for a while to step-up into the world of ARM chips: it looks like you can get chips that are much more capable at just around the same price as an ATmega328P, but…
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kmod's blog 