What follows from the collapse of NFTs?

Almost a quarter of a century after Napster fired a torpedo into the record industry one might have expected stability to have returned, but the turmoil continues well into the new century without any signs of resolution.

A new pen clip for AxiDraw

https://player.vimeo.com/video/871130951?badge=0

Tiny product update: A new version of the pen holder for AxiDraw, with slots for quick adjustment between the vertical and 45 degree angle positions.

What do recent trends in generative art mean for music?

In the last few years a big shift occurred in visual generative arts, somewhat obscured by the huge attention given to advances in machine learning and large language models, but worthy of examination for anyone interested in digital arts.

Запуск Тетриса на осциллографе из 90-х

В этой статье я хочу рассказать о том, как я запустил Тетрис на старом цифровом осциллографе. Без пайки и бега по граблям не обошлось... Зачем я это сделал — просто Just for fun.

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...

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...

How to design a music installation – an interview with Tim Murray-Browne (part 2)

How to design a music installation – an interview with Tim Murray-Browne (part 2) In the first part of this interview, artist Tim Murray-Browne discussed his approach to creating interactive …

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.

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...

How to design a music installation – an interview with Tim Murray-Browne (part 1)

Tim’s idea for a project was bold: He had no idea. Or to be more precise, his idea was to have no idea. Instead, the idea would emerge from a group.