When ordering at Pollin Electronic, there is this unwritten rule of at least throwing in one probably useless item, one that you might never even get to work (or that is broken in the first place). In my last order, this was a Samsung HCS-12SS59T vacuum fluorescent display[1]. I absolutely love this kind of display and they were cheap at only EUR 1.75 a piece. So why not?
In this post, I will showcase the project that this display became.
Markus | Updated Monday, November 27th 2017, 18:37
-- Tiny and cheap, but versatile
Figure 1. A rendered 3D-image of the Tiny-XO2 board
Introduction
The Tiny-XO2 is a small, versatile and cost-effective development platform for Lattice MachXO2 field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). It is built around a MachXO2-1200HC FPGA which features 1280 LUTs, 64 kbits of EBR SRAM and one PLL besides various other features[1]. The development board extends the functionality by providing a USB-to-serial converter and a crystal to allow quick and easy prototyping. All I/O pins are available on the .1 inch headers and labelled directly on the board. Figure 2 provides an overview of all the board's functions.
-- Debugging an application which only works in the debug build
Figure 1. The error message I was confronted with
Recently, I had an interesting bug in one of my C applications where the application would work in the debug build but not in the release build (-O3 etc.). It turned out to be a really stupid mistake of mine where I went 'How could that ever work?!' after finding it out. However, this opened my eyes to how strong gcc's optimization feature really is.
In this article, I will explain the mistake I made, how I went about solving it and what I learned about gcc in the process.
Figure 1. The Orange Pi PC single board computer
This post will explain how to build an Arch Linux system with the latest mainline Linux kernel for the Orange Pi PC by Xunlong from scratch. The target system is intended for server use only. Graphical features, while they may work, have not been tested and are not the focus of this post. The tutorial starts with a completely blank SD card, which means the following steps need to be accomplished in order to reach the goal:
Please note that, by enabling this video, data is transferred to YouTube LLC, and is subject to their privacy policy.
In this video I will show you one of the recent upgrades to my file server I have at home.
It had a cheap power supply and the original fans in there and I finally decided to invest the money and change them in the hope of better temperatures and longer lifespan for the entire system.
Please note that, by enabling this video, data is transferred to YouTube LLC, and is subject to their privacy policy.
This video demonstrates a little program I wrote to emulate vcom/vsim using GHDL. It enables Sigasi to check syntax and to simulate using GHDL/GtkWave.
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As shown in Figure 1, the referencing systems works.
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