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Brad's Technology Blog

Crowdsourced FPGA multicore cpu with virtual peripherals

Here's another interesting crowdsourced FPGA project.  Basical leveraging off Arduino, but adding a different style of perpheral interface. crowdsourced FPGA multicore cpu with virtual peripherals This seems like some of the "many small cores" projects of the past, but with an application in robotics and small devices...  I wonder about

Another interesting crowd-sourced FPGA platform

  Another interesting crowd-sourced FPGA platform for

Crowdsourced Zynq FPGA board

This is interesting.  A crowd sourced FPGA board with a Xilinx Zynq;  Basically Xilinx FPGA fabric with a hard ARM A9 CPU.  https://www.crowdsupply.com/krtkl/snickerdoodle It looks like you'll need to break out board as well to get reasonable connections (USB, HDMI).  Seems like a lot can be done with that.  I have not

Domain crossing techniques to avoid metastability in an FPGA

  I recently did some work on a working FPGA design.  It suffered from some classic clock domain crossing issue, but despite that it "worked".  But when stressed slightly it stopped working. I first wrote a classic verilog testbench.  I'll talk about those in an another post.  When I fixed the clock domain crossings the

Re-creating old CPU designs

Over the years I've done a number of experiments using Verilog, a hardware modeling language. In several of these experiments I have attempted to recreate old CPU designs like the MIT CADR lisp machine and the DEC PDP-8/I. My latest experiment is to recreate the PDP-11, in modern verlog, using modern simulation

a used 2g iphone is actually cool

I bought a used iphone 2G model for work. I didn't intend to use it as an actual phone. But, as time wore on, I started playing with it, and (mostly) prying it out of the hands of my 10 and 12 year olds and I've grown to like it. Oddly, I've yet to activate it. I suppose I will soon, but the idea of spending $75/month

Ubuntu upgrades. wow!

I have a couple of machines running Ubuntu. More and more lately. One machine at home was running Ubuntu 7.04 and mythtv. I was loath to change it because it was working and I hate having to type "ssh" when I'm watching tv. But, I finally did it over the holidays. First I upgraded to 7.10, which was a pain. 7.04 is not longer supported and

pcc (portable c compiler) lives again!

Two interesting things happened this week - the "R" programming language was talked about in the mainstream press. - I discovered that the openbsd folks are working on using a non-gcc C compiler (pcc). Turns out in the non-linux unix world there is not so much love for gcc. This makes some sense. gcc is huge and hard to