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 […]
Yes! It’s finally time to draw in 3D. Actually, you’re not going to get far without a basic understanding of 3D geometry. So there’s still some theory to get through. Feel free to skip this if you already know what model, view and projection matrices are. Otherwise, pay close attention.I’m going to focus on core […]
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. […]
In Hello Go Server Part 2 we created a server that could serve multiple pages but couldn’t serve images or other files. So, not very useful. Today, we’ll overcome this limitation so that we can serve pages with images, stylesheets (CSS), and other files. That covers everything needed for a visually stunning static website.Step One: […]
Today I’m going to show you another way to draw coloured triangles in Warp3D Nova. The result will be more boring than the previous tutorial’s method. However, it’s a good way to introduce using multiple vertex attributes and you’ll need that for almost everything from here on out.Per Vertex ColourVertex attributes are essentially “attributes that […]
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 […]
