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, […]
You’ve probably heard the old adage that you “learn more from mistakes/failure than success.” But is it true? I’ve seen arguments for both sides, including neuroscientific research which concluded that success has a greater effect on the brain. My take: success is the better teacher, but failures are absolutely necessary.Success Teaches What Works; Failure Teaches […]
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 […]
Last time we wrote a simple server that says hello. That’s nice, but very limited. Let’s extend it to serve multiple pages and also add template caching for better performance.Step One: Template CachingThe previous server loads and parses templates for every single request, which is very inefficient. Templates should be parsed once and cached in […]
Last time I promised a splash of colour. The plan was to implement per vertex colouring, but I’ve got a better idea. Let’s do something that Warp3D can’t do: procedural/algorithmic “texturing” using shaders. We’re going to write shaders that generate texels on-the-fly instead of reading them from memory. Sure, the old Warp3D could render identical […]
Last time we got the simplest of digital circuits working: an LED flasher. Now its time to move on to something more interesting. We’re going to design a serial communication module so that our hardware can communicate with other devices.Communication instantly adds an element of interactivity. We’ll be able to send commands to the hardware […]
When I redesigned this website, I ended up adapting a theme that was based on Twitter’s Bootstrap framework. While this looked good and worked well, there was one area where Bootstrap failed to deliver: the drop-down menus.Bootstrap is designed to be mobile friendly, which is great. On mobile devices everything is done with (fat) fingers […]
The Go language’s standard library comes complete with components for creating “web applications.” This is one of the things that attracted me to Go in the first place. So, today we will cover the basics needed to create a simple web-server in Go.This tutorial uses the Atom code editor based development environment from the previous […]
The previous tutorial set up everything needed to render graphics to a window using Warp3D Nova. Now, it’s time to actually draw something. This tutorial will introduce you to shaders and Vertex Buffer Objects (VBOs), and we’ll use them to draw a triangle.A Shader Based PipelineAt its core, modern Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are based […]
Alan Kay once said, “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” I’m not sure that I agree, but I’m definitely one of those software engineers who would like to make his own hardware. This tutorial will lay the foundations for designing hardware using relatively low-cost tools.Why design your own hardware? […]
