Author: Al Williams

4507 Articles

Another Introduction To FPGAs

March 1, 2018 by 33 Comments

FPGAs can have a steep learning curve, so getting started tutorials are a popular topic. Intel recently published a video titled “Basics of Programmable Logic: FPGA Architecture” and you can see it below. Of course, Intel bought Altera, so the material has a bit of Altera/Intel flavor to it, but the course is generic enough that the concepts will apply to just about any FPGA.

Of course, if you do want to use Quartus, there are quite a few follow-on courses, including the wonderfully named “Become a [sic] FPGA Designer in 4 Hours.” We’d really like to see a sequel titled “Become a Proficient FPGA Designer in 9 Months” but Google didn’t turn that one up.

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Microsoft Quantum Simulator Goes To Linux And Mac

February 28, 2018 by 13 Comments

Everyone seems to be gearing up for the race to be the king of quantum computers. The latest salvo is Microsoft’s, they have announced that their quantum simulator will now run on macOS and Linux, with associated libraries and examples that are now fully open source. They have produced a video about the new release, which you can see below.

Microsoft also claims that their simulator is much faster than before, especially on large simulations. Of course, really large simulations suffer from memory problems, not speed problems. You can run their simulator locally or on their Azure cloud.

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FPGA Calculator Uses Joystick

February 28, 2018 by 10 Comments

FPGAs are great fun, but sometimes you need a few starter projects under your belt. These projects might be something you could just as well do with a CPU, but you have to start somewhere. [LambdaPI] recently shared a 4-bit calculator created using an FPGA, and you can see it in the video below.

The calculator uses a Papilio FPGA board and a LogicStart accessory board for the display and switches. The Papilio normally uses schematic-based entry and Arduino code, but [LambdaPI] used VHDL. You enter the two 4-bit numbers on the 8 switches and then the joystick selects one of four operations (add, subtract, multiply, and divide).

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Software Development In… Bash

February 27, 2018 by 43 Comments

Truly good ideas tend to apply in all situations. The phrase is “never run with scissors”, not “don’t run with scissors unless you are just going into the next room.” Software development methodology is a good idea and most of us have our choice of tools. But what if you are developing a significant amount of bash or similar script? Should you just wing it because bash isn’t a “real” programming language? [Oscar] says no, and if you are writing more than two or three lines of script, we agree.

We’ve made the argument before (and many of you have disagreed) that bash is a programming language. Maybe not the greatest and certainly not the sexiest, but bash is near ubiquitous on certain kinds of systems and for many tasks is pretty productive. [Oscar] shows how he uses a source code formatter, a linter, and a unit test framework to bring bash scripting in line with modern software development. We are pretty sure he uses source control, too, but that seems so elementary that it doesn’t come up outside of a link to his repository in GitHub.

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Crankshaft: Open Source Car Computer

February 26, 2018 by 46 Comments

Modern cars and head units are pretty fancy gadget-wise. But what if your car still has an 8-track? No problem. Just pick up a Raspberry Pi 3 and a seven-inch touchscreen, and use Crankshaft to turn it into an Android Auto setup.

The open source project is based on OpenAuto which, in turn, leverages aasdk. The advantage to Crankshaft is it is a plug-and-play distribution. However, if you prefer, you can build it all yourself from GitHub.

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Review Of The Moai SLA 3D Printer

February 26, 2018 by 26 Comments

It is funny how we always seem to pay the same for a new computer. The price stays the same, but the power of the computer is better each time. It would appear 3D printers may be the same story. After all, it wasn’t long ago that sinking a thousand bucks or more on a 3D printer wouldn’t raise any eyebrows. Yet today you can better printers for a fraction of that and $1,300 will buy you an open source Moai SLA printer as a kit. [3D Printing Nerd] took a field trip to MatterHackers to check the machine out and you can see the results in the video below.

The printer uses a 150 mW laser to make parts up to 130 mm by 130 mm by 180 mm. The laser spot size is 70 micron (compare that to the typical 400 micron tip on a conventional printer). The prints require an alcohol bath after they are done followed by a UV curing step that takes a few hours.

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Moltoduino: Arduinos All The Way Down

February 26, 2018 by 23 Comments

It is getting difficult to find a desktop or laptop computer with only a single CPU. Even a typical ARM-based computer now probably has multiple cores. Of course, there’s nothing to stop you from using multiple microcontrollers — like the Arduino — together. To make the process neater, [Dimitris Platis] put together Moltoduino, essentially an Arduino on a shield made to plug into another Arduino. And, yes, they will stack. You can see a video about the open source boards, below.

The key is how the board brings the pins out to connections that are easy to jumper between boards. There are several obvious use cases, but one that [Dimitris] is particularly interested in is hardware-in-the-loop testing. The idea is that you can use a simulated I/O device in one computer to exchange fake data with the software under test.

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