It’s finally here: The Kea Campus membership portal is finally open and waiting for you. I first started hinting about it two months ago (link). I ran a survey, documented the process of building the membership portal, got delayed… and now it’s finally here. But what is it? Who is it for? And what’s inside?To […]
I’m sad to announce that I’m shutting down the DIY MiniITX laptop project. At least, for now. The reason is simple: the chance of recouping the investment needed are slim, and I need to focus on tasks that are more likely to generate an in income and keep the lights on.Lessons LearnedIt’s always good to […]
The new, slightly larger LCD panel has arrived, as has a PCIe riser plus mounting frame. Someone else warned me that multiple PCIe risers that he tried didn’t work, a good reminder that everything should be tested…The video above shows the test run using the new components. As you can see, it’s all working well. […]
Almost all modern GPUs use the Single-Instruction Multiple-Thread (SIMT) architecture. With SIMT a group of threads (or wavefront) execute the same instruction in lock-step. Apart from making it a pain to program, it also means that when threads execute different code paths (e.g., if/else), the GPU must execute each branch one-by-one instead of simultaneously. This […]
I recently had trouble with my laptop. The machine became almost unusable while Windows 10 was downloading updates. So, I decided to add more RAM and a faster SSD hard-drive. I’m pleased to say that the machine is operating faster.This was also a golden opportunity to take a peek at how the laptop was designed. […]
ERROR It’s taken a while and several iterations, but I’ve finally got a a full HD (1920×1080) LCD panel and controller that I’m happy with.What I like:Full HD screen with low response time A matte anti-glare screen surface The controller has a sturdy cable & connector to the LCD panel Can be powered from a […]
Alan Kay said, “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” Not sure that I agree, but I’m definitely a software engineer who likes to make his own hardware. This tutorial will lay the foundations for hardware design using relatively low-cost tools.Why design your own hardware? A few possible reasons:It gives […]
Where to begin? There’s a new Altera based development kit (dev-kit) sitting on my desk,. and I’ve never used an Altera FPGA before. There’s a lot to learn.Fortunately I’ve started from scratch before many times. There’s a process that can be followed to get up to speed, and this blog post will outline that process. […]
This blog post was supposed to get the previous tutorial’s UART running on real hardware. However, my plans were derailed swiftly starting with a glitch.The tutorial’s design would have allowed you to switch an LED on and off remotely, as per the following:When an ‘E’ character is received, then the LED will be switched on, […]
At the end of the previous tutorial I hinted that there was a flaw in the UART’s design. Did you find it? The problem is the prescaler (or clock divider); it doesn’t deliver an accurate clock. Today, we’re going to fix that.The ProblemThe generated clocks aren’t exactly the values that they should be. Let’s do […]
