electronics

Posted on 12-12-2007 under electronics

I just started using my newest toy. The Xilinx Spartan 3A Starter Kit. Finally my very own FPGA.

“Using” would be too much of an exaggeration at this point though. More like “plugged it in and looked at the demo apps”. The demos themselves are pretty cool. Considering the only other exposure I have had in embedded systems is 8-bit RISC controllers, hearing recorded voices speak in about twenty different languages on a dev board is truly awesome. I haven’t tried the VGA demo yet, but it promises to be amazing (scrolling graphics, animation and stuff).

Before my drool renders my keyboard nigh unusable, and maybe shorts the board, I’m gonna sign off.

Posted on 09-07-2007 under firmware

Cleaning up code is a real pain. Cleaning up code that works, only to find that it has stopped working when you cleaned it up, is an even greater pain.

Confirming to code standards is a real pain. Confirming to standards that you’ve set yourself because your company doesn’t have any is an even greater pain.

Trying to improve the way you handle projects is a pain, but definitely worth it.

Watching a season of Boston Legal is not a pain.

Posted on 08-07-2007 under avr, electronics

Found a wonderful little C helper library for the AVR. Its called, simply enough, AVRlib. The poackage includes a lot of useful functions for interfacing various devices with the AVR. Here’s some of the more interesting ones.

It even has some cool networking code: drivers for running ethernet cards and chips, and a network stack.

What I think will be most useful is the software UART code, using which you can have more than one UARTs on your AVR. Albeit you’ll have to let go of one whole timer. This probably wont work with FreeRTOS.

Haven’t used it yet, but I’m sure it should compile on gcc. Although the library does use some pretty old coding constructs ( seriously, who uses sbi() these days?).

Next entries »