kenz0r

Joined 12 years ago

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Jul 26

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What killed WSL for me was the incredibly janky way I had to share USB peripherals. usb-ipd works 80% of the time, all the time.

Comment · 1 year ago

I've found the OnShape flow pretty good for this, using the Laser Joint and Auto Layout scripts he referenced - thread here: https://forum.onshape.com/discussion/14166/designing-laser-c...

One thing that wasn't mentioned is that its important to measure the plywood you're using. 18mm ply can vary from 17 to 19mm so when you're making tight finger joints its important to know the thickness of the sheets that the parts will be made from.

Once it comes to actual cutting, the tool (in my case, a water jet) will often have an auto-nester to lay out the parts, but being able to prototype the part nesting in CAD means its faster to optimise the design to fit the sheets you've got.

Comment · 1 year ago

My tenure at Amazon was during the meeting link era, rather than putting everyone in a room - I agree, way better. Get your secondary oncall to give updates to the room, while you dig in and figure out what is actually happening in relative peace

Comment · 2 years ago

If you _must_ use I2C, then look at SMBUS if its an option for the parts. I2C's biggest failing is that there is no protocol level timeout, so one stuck device can block your entire bus unless you have a reset line for all the peripherals on it. https://www.analog.com/en/resources/design-notes/guide-to-co...

Comment · 2 years ago

If you enjoyed the story, you might like Pantheon - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon_(TV_series) which is based on a few short stories of a similar vein from Ken Liu

Comment · 6 years ago

I had a good one with a thesis student I supervised. The security micro she chose was designed to sit between SPI Flash and the main SoC, so a big feature was hardware accelerated SPI slave support. Guess what feature didn't work on the dev board...

Comment · 6 years ago

I guess it depends on what they're trying to say (which isn't clear). When you get an AWS machine with 36 vCPUs, if you pick Intel, you get 36 threads, if you pick a Graviton2, you get 36 Cores.

Comment · 6 years ago

Just to correct you on firearms. Police officers in Australia are generally issues firearms (semi-automatic pistols).

Comment · 6 years ago

Yes, you can :) https://www.uncarvedblock.com.au/build-climbing-wall-at-home... gives you a bit of a guide, and if you search climbing walls on youtube, plenty of people have been building them.

Mine is framed in 70x35mm pine, and built from formwork plywood (formply), which is 17mm thick. The holds attach with 3/8th inch bolts that go into t-nuts in the back. I still need to give the formply a bit of a sand and put a non-slip coating on it, as the holds can rotate if I've not recently tightened them.

Comment · 6 years ago

I built a climbing wall at home for myself and the kids, since the bouldering gyms have closed. Its not as good as a gym, but hopefully I'll keep my some of my grip strength!

https://imgur.com/a/nTXZMyK

Comment · 7 years ago

Petitboot does do x86 - we're using it on an AMD x86-64 network appliance.

https://opengear.com/products/om2200-operations-manager/

Comment · 9 years ago

Polling GPIOs is bad, because you miss events. Looking through the source code, the author has functions to get the state of GPIO pins, which send a command over the USB serial port, then read the output. This is fine for things that don't change very often, but if you've got a keypad, or something that may have a relatively short pulse width, you really want a notification that something has happened (GPIO 4 just transitioned from 0-1). The simple way of doing that for this project would be for the hardware to send a message when that happens - its easy to set up interrupts on the MCU, and then send a message back down the serial channel saying what happened. Latency won't be great, but you shouldn't miss things. The Serial interface (over USB) isn't too bad, but will add latency over a raw USB interface.

Comment · 9 years ago

Serial interface, and GPIO reads are polled. Its a good first or second year uni project, but its not a product.

Comment · 9 years ago

True, but from my recollection, most hardcards were running MFM or RLL disk controllers, rather than IDE.

Comment · 10 years ago

As expected, the stuff that you really want to be able to replace (Screen, SoC, and RAM) are the ones you can't.