Stephen's Weblog

Ah right, I was planning to post last weekend;

I haven’t actually done anything too interesting though :) just messing around with some stuff while I’m away on vacation; Mostly doing less than usual though – that’s ok every now and then.

I’ve been writing weekly now for a while – I’ve decided, though, that it’s unsustainable. Writing these posts has been a great motivator for getting some of my projects done, but they also don’t leave me a lot of time to do so.

So, I’m shifting the format and will write blog posts every other week – I’ll continue next week.

Thanks for reading! I hope some of this material has been useful to you, and please do let me know if you’d like to see something specific, or if anything isn’t clear.

Remember the PCI card from a few weeks ago?

Not too long after that, I did send out an order to manufacture some boards – and this last week they finally arrived! I’ve assembled a few, tested them, run into a few problems, solved them, and finally got a pretty basic PCI Port-80h debug card working.

In this post I’ll walk through these things, and talk some more about the PCI interface.

(more…)

Well, it was my intention to talk about USB in more detail today, but my USB project has been a little sidetracked – today I wrote the majority of my USB Device implementation but am still stuck debugging a hardware feature that’s not quite working how I think it should… I have a pretty good understanding of USB now from this project, but do actually want to make sure all of my assertions hold before documenting it ;)

So, nothing too interesting this week; Next week should be good though. (and the week after, and the week after. I have quite a bit lined up now, just not all done yet)

I’ve decided that every weekend (starting next weekend) I’ll update this blog and detail one of my projects; I’ll either write up something that I’ve already completed, something that’s in progress, or something that I’m planning to do in the near future.

If nothing else it could be interesting to follow,  and will serve as somewhat of a historical record of what I’ve been up to.

I’m a little worried at this point about running out of content, but I do have a bundle of little projects that I’ve completed in the recent past that I can write up, for the first several weeks. Hopefully I have something further by the time I’m done with those… :)

Most likely I won’t take the effort to provide project design files or documentation, but if there’s interest I can probably make that sort of thing available – These are mostly just hacky personal projects after all (though, at least a few of them have larger intended audiences).

(Small update: Apparently comments were broken, but they’ve been fixed now)

Hi! It’s been a while since my last post; I’ve decided that I should post more often even if I don’t have a lot to say, as sometime soon I will have more to talk about.

As usual, there have been a lot of projects in progress, but nothing I want to share publicly at this time. A few things have happened since last post though:

• I entered and did horribly in LudumDare #15 (Caverns) (My horrible entry)
• I’ve worked on some hardware projects (Like this Optical Switch, which switches between optical audio inputs. Yes, I’m too cheap to get a receiver, but with this I don’t need one.)
• I’ve built my XNA game engine up and it’s quite capable, I’m now in the process of actually putting together a game with it. (No screenshots publicly available yet. Maybe soon)
• A pile of other small stuff; I’ve tinkered with driver development, played with some hardware ideas, thought about a lot of stuff I won’t be doing for months, learned some math,… you get the idea.

Some things coming up in the near future:

• As I said, I’m working on an XNA game. I’m hoping to release it before too terribly long, so expect to see more about it soon.
• I am working on designing a PCI card / general purpose hardware development platform – This took a back seat to the XNA game a month or two ago, so is only half done, but I’ll be posting about that when I get it further as well.
• Revisiting the DS wifi is on my list for “after the current set of important projects,” But I’m going to make more of an effort to get to it this year.

Well, that’s how life is. I’ve got far too much to do but pretty happy with what I am doing. I wonder if  anyone is still paying attention to this blog :)

I’m still somewhat interested in teaching, and maybe I will still get to that arcane series on software rendering I was thinking of – Any other suggestions on things to write about?

Hey, it’s been a while. I’ve taken a few minutes (well an hour or two) to upgrade wordpress and check/tweak my site’s links – I’d like to use this blog more often

Since I’ve gone through all that effort, I should probably write something…

I’ve been involved in a lot lately,

• Work – Eats a lot of my time – I really like what I do. I actually have an office job now, never would have imagined that :)
• Personal projects – Still doing stuff all over the place. I may link these from time to time but mostly keep them to myself
• XNA games – Have a big  project or two in progress. Also not saying much about this, but I may link something from time to time…

Also, I have a lot of plans for the future,

• DS Wifi project – Reverse engineering the hardware again, more thoroughly – Completely rewriting the 802.11 and TCP/IP stacks. Not going to start for a few months at least, and it will probably take a few more months when I do get started.
• Some hardware ideas have been brewing, but I won’t say much about these…
• Some emulation ideas have been brewing, but I won’t say much about these…
• There are always far more ideas than I can imagine having time for.

I’ve decided I will post interesting milestones of large projects or interesting completed small projects here when I have spare time to do so- It shouldn’t be hard to keep this blog more active than it has been :)

I’m also currently playing with Twitter, so some additional information about what I’m doing is available there – http://twitter.com/sgstair/

One other thing: I’m toying with the idea of writing an article every week or two, but I haven’t decided what exactly to write about yet. If you have ideas I’d appreciate if you tell me, in the comments or otherwise. Currently I’m considering writing a series of articles on building a software rendering 3D engine from scratch.

Well, that’s all  for now. Maybe I’ll manage to post here more often :)

Hi! Well, the Opti compo has ended. I haven’t got around to judging cause pepsiman probably won, and I’ve been really short on time, and tied up in other things.

I’m not sure just how much I want to say yet, but I have moved (I’m in the Seattle area now), and have an office job now – which is new for me. I’m still working out how much I’ll be able to continue working on my personal projects, but I will post more on that when I know for sure. I’m not sure how things are going to unfold yet but I will certainly post more when I do know.

And then, I’ll try to clean up the pieces of all the stuff I dropped in the process of moving out here and getting started in a new place.

Since I’m not really in the business of detailing my life’s complexities in my blog (which, well, is what everyone else seems to use them for), the title of this post really sums up all I’m really going to say; Ordinarily I think life being complicated and interesting is a good thing, but it has it’s down sides too, and I’ve run into that lately.

That being said, I strive to not let things like life’s trivial and big problems bother me, and I’m continuing to work on entirely too many projects. Some things are making progress, others not so much. I’m prioritising Opti, followed by the logic analyzer, and I’ll decide what to do next when those are ready. I’ve picked up a few more smaller projects lately, tinkering around with graphics effects, video capture and image recognition, and I still have a stack of books to read.

I’m trying to decide whether I should disclose some of the smaller projects I’m tinkering around with and release binaries / possibly source / other information about them, I don’t really see this stuff being very useful to many people, and it does take time to document, depending on what level of disclosure I go with – but I think it’s generally pretty neat stuff – jury’s still out on this one but if you have an opinion I’d like to hear it.

Some of you might have been following this, but recently I’ve completed some DS homebrew code to make it simple to send data between processors; This took a good bit longer than it probably should have but it is done now, and being integrated into libnds as part of our plans for world domination, er, our plans to make homebrew easier. The basic idea behind the system is to take the single pipe between the processors (the IPC FIFO) and use a system wrapped around it to create a set of virtual channels, through which you can send data from one processor to the other. The system is set up with the ability to use callbacks, which will automatically dispatch the message on the receiving end to a user function, or the receiving code can just check the incoming queue occasionally. As it was designed, the system will pipe one of 3 types of value through to the other processor – it can either send a mainram address, a 32bit data value, or a sequence of 32bit values. It’s designed to be very fast and efficient about this sort of thing, the latency to send a value through is very low, and it’s all interrupt driven to receive data as soon as it comes in.

For now, the code is not available to the general public, right now it’s intended to be used as a low-level communication layer and currently the plans are being made to integrate it into the libnds examples as a way to quickly get information (buttons, touch, rtc) from arm7, and  provide a channel for controlling the arm7 (i.e. sound, power control, others) – the hope is to have a more solid interface for this sort of thing to help people who don’t really want to deal with the hardware directly but still want to play sound and things like that. I expect that some level of access to all this will also be provided for people who want to do their own thing on arm7, and this code I hope (and expect) will help provide a better environment for developing applications across both CPUs.