A paper on describing circuits in an agda DSL: http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~swier004/publications/2015-types-draft.pdf

Going more carefully now through this little tutorial on fpga programming with the iCEstick. It's in spanish, which makes it slightly more challenging, but also more fun.

Achievement unlocked teaching myself things every ece freshman knows, part 938472 and a half: I grok Thevenin's theorem well enough to prove the R-2R ladder works for digital-to-analog conversion ( Read more... )

Went through the projects of "nand2tetris part 1" in a few hours over last evening and this. Very cute to cobble together a little cpu from nand gates. I guess I never appreciated the various relationships between other architectural choices and the choice of having a control FSM in a cpu versus not --- notably the nand2tetris cpu is single-cycle, ( Read more... )

K made some very nice thai chicken curry for dinner; didn't accomplish much myself. Trying to read through the RISC-V Rocket implementation to see if I can understand much. Conclusion so far is "not really".

Pootling about today looking at Chisel again. Apparently people who are really into high-level synthesis (in the sense of writing, like, C-ish programs and trusting the clever compiler to turn it into hardware) think it's total nonsense, but as a software person, I find it naively rather appealing. RTL as an abstraction isn't that hard to grok, and ( Read more... )

There's some really neat hardware research out of Berkeley in the last few years, speaking as someone who's often wistfully wished he knew more about VLSI design, but who has taken one look at verilog and run screaming in the other direction very fast.

Check it out: Firrtl is a low-level-ish intermediate language that compiles to Verilog, that ( Read more... )

Today, among other job-hunty things, I experimented with the electrical properties of a bananaThe MaKey MaKey's 22MΩ pull-up resistors (which are essential to its main mode of operation of detecting closed circuits through relatively high-impedance real-world objects such as humans and fruit) seem to mean, however, that noise dominates signal when ( Read more... )

I got impatient with the arduino IDE because I can't even get it to display line numbers or jump to the line number of an error. Sheesh, what do I even want an IDE for if it can't do that. Pry emacs from my cold dead fingers etc. etc ( Read more... )

Playing with xmas presents:

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I just hooked up one arduino-based device to another, which tells it to blink an led at the same time as it blinks its own. (Audio/video quality is crummy, I know.) I have never been much of a hardware nerd, but blinkenlights are still delightful.