Quick update: What’s going on?

Welcome to our long-awaited community post, where we aim to address the most commonly asked question while also unveiling some more news. Let’s get started!

As you may have noticed, there haven’t been any community updates as of late, and we are sorry for the prolonged silence. This isn’t because the community hasn’t been busy, quite the opposite is true. Instead, the problem is that the usual community update authors are too busy with their daily jobs and other tasks around the community. Although thanks to some...

GSoC23 — Workweek 10

Introduction

This week I have for you a bug hunt of the special kind: Modpath delays enabled by themselves work, interconnection delays as well, but when enabled together together, the modpath delays are ignored.

And as the second topic this week, I'd like to present the interconnect test suite to track the progress of my work on this feature.

I was trying to enable both interconnection delays and specify paths at the same time when I noticed that the modpath delays annotated by the specify blocks suddenly did not work anymore.

After some troubleshooting, it turned out that this issue surfaces when a...

Cynthion Delivery Timeline Update

Note: This is a crosspost of a Cynthion update on Crowd Supply: https://www.crowdsupply.com/great-scott-gadgets/cynthion/updates/cynthion-delivery-timeline-update

Hello, campaign backers and other supporters of Cynthion and Great Scott Gadgets! In this update, we hoped to tell you that manufacturing was in progress and that we were getting close to delivering the first Cynthions to you. Unfortunately, we have encountered more delays while getting the hardware ready to go to manufacturing.

The first delay was caused by another component availability barrier, which is now solved. After our last hardware update, we placed an order with our contract manufacturer for the additional components added to the Cynthion hardware...

GSoC23 — Workweek 9

Introduction

As a reminder, last time I wrote about the issue when multiple functors are connected to a single source. In that case it is unclear to which of the functors the interconnect path must be annotated.

This week I have spent some time in VVP to find out how to add input and output buffers to modules, so that this ambiguity can be solved.

I was also writing smaller tests to make sure that the implementation I am working on is functioning correctly, and to find out what situations are not annotated correctly.

My goal is to add input and output buffers to...

GSoC23 — Workweek 8

Introduction

I am currently in the middle of implementing the SDF INTERCONNECT feature and while there was fast progress early on things have now stalled.

What is the issue? Let me explain this by showing you how I intended to annotate the design.

We start at the VPI side, where $sdf_annotate is called to start the process of SDF annotation. Once a INTERCONNECT token is parsed, we call sdf_interconnect_delays with the appropriate parameters.

(INTERCONNECT A0 input1.A (0.014:0.014:0.014) (0.006:0.006:0.006))

(An example of an interconnect annotation)

This function finds the port handles in the respective scopes and requests an intermodpath via vpi_handle_multi and the ports as...

GSoC23 — Workweek 7

Introduction

It's been a versatile week with a lot of stuff going on. Let's see what we got.

To begin with, the PR to handle delayed signals in timing checks as assignments has been merged at the start of the week (PR #966).

This is great because it means if timing checks like $setuphold or $recrem are used in standard cells, the delayed signals are now correctly connected. This is important for SKY130, because until now the outputs of flip-flops and latches were just left unconnected in...

Free Stuff - June 2023

The June recipient for the Great Scott Gadgets Free Stuff Program is Daniel. Dan is planning to use the HackRF One we are sending him to run workshops in his school and with his amateur radio group. He will also be creating videos with his new HackRF One on his YouTube channel “Radio Dan ZL2DTL”. Please welcome Radio Dan to the software-defined radio community!

Notice: Fix for Firmware Compatibility Issue

It has come to our attention that Omega2 modules produced since November 2022 (date codes 2245 and later, MAC addresses starting with 88:1E:59) have an incompatibility with older builds of the v0.3.3 Omega firmware. The incompatibility in the older firmware causes a kernel panic, with the Omega2 failing to complete the boot process.

The devices work out of the box with the firmware that’s flashed during manufacturing. The problem arises when the devices are re-flashed with older builds of the v0.3.3 firmware, or customized firmware that’s based on these older builds.

This incompatibility does not affect any devices produced before November 2022.

Reverse engineering Tesla 2-bus protocol

In my flat they have installed these new digital door phones running on two wires manufactured by Tesla:

I wanted to be notified when someone rings when we are not at home so I decided to reverse engineer it.

During idle, there is a voltage of about 23V which is there to power the phones as they don’t have any other power supply; during a call, the voltage drops to about 12,6V and current goes to 47mA. So I took my scope and started to measure the signal. In short, I have found, that there is some sort of digital...

Free Stuff - May 2023

The May recipient for the Great Scott Gadgets Free Stuff Program is the UCLA IEEE Wireless, RF, and Analog Project (WRAP). Participants in this club have the opportunity to learn hands-on radio engineering skills by designing, building, and testing a 2-way radio system capable of operating in the 100s of MHz. Through this project, students can learn digital and analog radio techniques like implementing filters and a mixer from discrete diodes and using coils for up/downconversion. WRAP asked for a HackRF One to aid in debugging wireless links, where they will use the HackRF One both as a modulated waveform...