Stephen's Weblog

Well, when I initially pushed myself into writing on a schedule, I thought having to write about something periodically would be an interesting challenge; I’ve learned a few things since then, one of which is that when I don’t have anything specific to talk about, I don’t really have anything to say either; So I’m changing the format of this blog once again to just post about project completion & milestones when they happen, rather than on a fixed schedule. Looking back the updates I’ve made are interesting from the perspective of seeing how things were going over time, but I think it will be more interesting if I’m just writing about the stuff that excites me :)

With that said, there’s nothing to  show for this week besides minor progress on a few fronts; so here’s a picture of my desk as it stands pretty recently:

Projects have been moving more slowly than I anticipated, and I don’t really have time to write much, so I’ll defer this update; Will post about what I’ve been doing in (just under) 2 weeks.

Happy new year, all.

Nothing really big to show off, but a few things are moving along:

First, I’ve started a Flickr page! Pictures I take (typically of stuff I’m working on or taking apart) will be auto-uploaded to http://www.flickr.com/photos/sgstair/

I don’t always update the descriptions but any questions posted in the comments will be answered :)

Second, there has been some progress on bitbox; After some early failures, I now have the bitbox_test board working! I misread the datasheet for the LPC134x chips initially – The USB bootloader requires an external crystal; I’m not quite sure why I thought otherwise. For the bitbox I am attempting to do USB without a crystal even though the internal RC OSC might be slightly out of spec. Maybe I’ll need to revise it.

Next I’ll be writing some initial firmware for this board and then all things bitbox should start to move along.

I also ordered some laser cut acrylic for the test fixture, and should get that back in a bit over a week – this test fixture has been interesting to design – it’s a little overengineered in hindsight, I’ve since designed another fixture (for another project) that’s far simpler. Below is my laser cutting pattern with a few designs:

I’m using Ponoko to have this produced – will have to talk more about it next time.

Still nothing to speak of, but a few things are in the pipeline for next time :)

Still nothing major to report on.

Several of my projects are still making progress, though incremental at best; I may just need to rethink the set of things I’m working on in order to move more quickly again. Or just somehow become less lazy ;)

Well, I’ll say more later.

I’m still off doing a number of other random things, and haven’t done anything interesting enough to post about it yet.

• Limited progress on the PCI Express firmware… Should get back to that. Have learned a lot about high speed serial, and a lot of related fields.
• I have obtained some cheap wired 3d shutter glasses and a 120Hz projector… this may be interesting.
• Also been reading books, this one has been really interesting.
• And, dealing with some failing hardware :\ one of my RAID cards died recently.
• Been dabbling in high speed video, but nothing interesting here yet…
• Have a few PCB projects staring at me waiting for me to complete them :)
• …And a growing collection of other projects doing the same.

Well, maybe next time I’ll have more to say, wish me luck.

Disappointment! I’m deep in work and not writing up anything yet again…

Come to think of it, I have completed the firmware for my little PCI card, which is now actually a useful port 80h monitor, but that’s just an incremental update to its previous firmware.

This weekend I’m working on trying to build PCI Express firmware for a FPGA card; This is a lot of new stuff to me and I’m not sure I’ll make it this weekend, but it should be fun!

Below is a picture of the system I’ve set up to test with:

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.

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