Stephen's Weblog

Hi again,

More projects are incoming – but I have got a few things partway done, here’s one of them:

This circuit board is  a very basic tool that I’m going to use to monitor the SMBUS data in a computer; I have some things I’d like to find in it, but I’m also curious as to what all traffic exists on this bus. I’ve already sent this board to be produced, so should have some results from it in the near future :)

I’ve also been doing some work on PC booting; I’ve written a boot sector that does some stupid stuff; still exploring this space, and I’ll talk more about it later.

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:

I haven’t done anything worth mentioning, so here’s a picture of some PCBs! :)

This is the USB Jtag PCB I previously mentioned, and I had it produced in a group PCB order managed by Laen – They turned out nice and came back pretty quickly, I’ll definitely be sending him more PCBs

As I was on vacation though, I just recently ordered the parts to complete these boards, and haven’t got them yet. I’ve also been thinking about priorities and am working more heavily on some projects which I won’t blog about :)

Things are still developing though, keep watching and I should have more to talk about in 2 weeks.

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.

Despite having 2 weeks for this, I haven’t actually completed anything notable; So I’m just going to post some WIP images of a PCB I’ve designed to do general purpose programming (Generally jtag, but also AVR)

I’ve been working out the concepts in software using the modified USB stick (as I mentioned previously) but just haven’t had enough time to allocate to it yet. Soon, though.

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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.

So, many of you use JTAG?

I’ve been using JTAG for many years now, which started with FPGAs, and has mostly been for CPLDs and FPGAs since- but it’s also a pretty widely used protocol for programming and debugging mid range microcontrollers all the way up to high end CPUs. I’ve always wanted to look into how JTAG worked in more depth, but never really had the time.

Now, I do have some time (and some projects which depend on JTAG hacking) – so this post will go into the world of JTAG. (more…)