Free Stuff - August 2023
The August recipient for the Great Scott Gadgets Free Stuff Program is The Factory, a student-run hardware design lab at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. The Factory aims to give students access to advanced tools for their hardware projects, space to work on their projects, and support in developing technical skills.
The Factory has previously offered workshops on VIM, VHDL, C, and PC building. They also run a Hackathon called The Forge. In one instance of The Forge students formed teams and built a line tracing robot to race against the other teams. In non-event related times, students in this lab...
Custom Images on EVE Displays
A frequent question that is received by our support team is how to load custom images on our EVE lineup of displays. Due to differences in the EVE processors between boards and other factors, depending on the display you have, the process may change. The different processes for the boards have been outlined below. The only software required is the handy EVE Asset Builder (EAB) available on Bridgetek’s website here.
Images from SD CardThe process outlined below is for an SD card loaded with your image. To program an image to the Arduino’s flash memory without the use of an SD...
GSoC23 — Final Project Report
Table of Contents Table of Contents Introduction Project Information My Work During GSoC Documentation Rework and Cleanup Implementing SDF INTERCONNECT OpenLane Example Designs An Excursion Into Timing Checks Challenges and Learnings Future Plans Final Words - Thank You Introduction
All good things come to an end, and so does my Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project about implementing the SDF INTERCONNECT feature in Icarus Verilog. This feature is important if you want to perform timing accurate Verilog simulations of an ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit). Once a design has been hardened, the delays can be extracted from the actual physical layout, as can be seen in the example of this RISC-V CPU:
PicoRV32 RISC-V CPU...
Moondancer: A Facedancer backend for Cynthion
Note: This is a crosspost of a Cynthion update on Crowd Supply: https://www.crowdsupply.com/great-scott-gadgets/cynthion/updates/moondancer-a-facedancer-backend-for-cynthion
One of the core features promised in the Cynthion announcement is the ability to create your own Low-, Full- or High- speed USB devices using the Facedancer library – even if you don’t have experience with digital-hardware design, HDL or FPGA architecture. If you’ve been eagerly anticipating this feature, we’re pleased to introduce Moondancer, a new Facedancer backend for Cynthion.
What is Facedancer?Facedancer is a host-side Python library for writing programs that remotely control the physical USB port(s) on Facedancer boards such as the original Facedancer21, GreatFET One, and...
GSoC23 — Workweek 15
Introduction
Now that we're approaching a full timing simulation in Icarus Verilog, we somewhat want to be sure that our design "meets" timing. But what does that even mean, to meet timing? It means that all of our latches, flip-flops and other time-critical cells are happy with the signals they get.
A prominent example is the setup and hold time for flip-flops and latches. I have published a blog post where I went into setup and hold times in a bit more detail: GSoC23 — Workweek 5
If we take a look at the SKY130 standard cell library and take for example...
Great Scott Gadgets is now on Mastodon
Great Scott Gadgets is on Mastodon! You’ll get a lot of the same information as you get on our other social media profiles, but if Mastodon is your platform preference, we now have you covered.
Omega2 Pro, LTE Global, LTE North America, Dash, and Tau LiDAR Camera Now Available on DigiKey
We’ve got exciting news to share today!
Onion’s collection of Omega2 Single Board Computers, the Tau LiDAR Camera, and the Omega2 16-pin header are available for immediate shipment worldwide through DigiKey.
What products fall under Omega2 Single Board Computers?This includes the Omega2 Pro, Omega2 Dash, Omega2 LTE, and Omega2 LTE Global Model (OM-O2LTE-G) that’s had a recent surge of interest.
How can I order one from Digikey?Follow these links to the Digikey listing for each of these products
Omega2 Pro (OM-O2PRO)Omega2 LTE Global Model (OM-O2LTE-G)Omega2 LTE (OM-O2LTE-NA)Omega2 Dash (OM-O2DASH)Tau LiDAR Camera (TA-L10)Omega2 16-Pin Header (AC-H-2M16P)Our How to Buy page has also been updated with...
Tracing the Line: the art of drawing machines and pen plotters
Tracing the Line is a book of plotter art available for preorder now, coming out this November. Many of our featured artists are included in the book, and AxiDraw makes several appearances in the video teaser. Looks like it will be fantastic!
IDE для разработки на AVR (GCC и Rat)
Раньше для разработки на Си вообще, и под микроконтроллеры AVR в частности я использовал IDE NetBeans, относительно уникальной фичей которой была поддержка С/С++ и GCC-ассемблера из коробки, с подсветкой синтаксис, возможностью сборки проекта и рефакторинга. Но, увы, после того как Oracle передали NetBeans в Apache, те превратили эту некогда неплохую IDE в унылое говно, выпилив оттуда поддержку С/С++ и заменив её на непонятное нечно, которое как бы есть (в меню создать С/++ проект все ещё можно), но по факту уже много лет как абсолютно неработоспособно.
В итоге пришлось искать альтернативу для разработки на...
Как понять сколько дать памяти задаче во FreeRTOS. Распределение памяти. Отладочные функции
Вообще тема довольно обширная и тут есть множество разных методик, принципов. Да еще FreeRTOS поддерживает кучу разных методов организации памяти. Я предпочитаю использовать кооперативный режим без вытеснения (задачи передают управление сами) и модель кучи heap_1.c, в которой все создается один раз и не удаляется. Поэтому нет фрагментации. Влезает потенциально меньше, зато меньше нежданчиков, когда формально память есть, а выделить ее не получается. И случается это после дождичка в четверг на полную луну.
В этом случае приходится тщательней оценивать аппетиты задачи, чтобы выделить ей ресурсов столько сколько нужно. Что особенно важно, когда задач много.
В двух словах у нас память...