Cobbled-together Profiler I recently got Circuitpython working on Fomu! But there's an issue with the speed of Fomu's SPI flash: It's currently incredibly slow, and that makes for a poor experience. Worse still, the program
Clocks and Timing are Hard Computers are binary things, right? A bit is either "1" or "0".Except when it isn't.Computers are built from logic gates, which are built up from silicon, which is based in physics.
Fomu EVT: Prototype or Business Card? When starting a project from scratch, it's important to create prototypes. For programming, you usually create small snippets that demonstrate what you want. Fortunately, software is quick to compile, so you're free to
Fomu: An FPGA in your USB Port We've just started crowdfunding Fomu, and FPGA that fits in your USB port! The original project -- Tomu -- was a really interesting little device. It was a simple ARM Cortex M0 MCU
Tomu Plastic Case Part 2: PCB Modifications When designing a plastic case, it is important to work within the limitations of the medium. The design process begins with the PCB, which must fit within the final design space and still
Making Tomu: Plastic Case Overview This series of blogposts details the steps I took to create a plastic case for Tomu. Tomu is a project I helped to crowdfund. Initially created by Tim "mithro" Ansell, Tomu
palawan Palawan project #1: button box June saw lots of progress on Palawan. Many bugs were fixed in the Grainuum stack, the bootloader was fleshed out, and stability was improved. The system is usable now, and just about feature-complete.
Grainuum 1.3: Now with fewer bugs In the process of bringing up Palawan DVT1, I've run across a number of bugs in Grainuum. Most notably, several subtle timing errors where the loop was one cycle too short or too
Love-to-Code Debug Shoe Looking to debug your Chibitronics Love-to-Code board, but don't want to solder on headers? If you have access to a 3D printer, grab the LtC Debug Shoe, print it out, and crimp on
novena Clustering Novena Server clustering is a topic I've been cirous about for a rather long time, from back in the Slashdot days where one would constantly "imagine a beowulf cluster of" any given
palawan Palawan DVT1 Build I've just finished taping out Palawan DVT1. This is the first build in a long time, and is a rather heavy redesign. The three biggest changes are: New CPU/Radio pair 433 MHz
usb Palawan's USB Stack is Now Known as Grainuum The USB stack from project Palawan has grown beyond its original scope. The bootloader contains a completely separate copy, and it has been ported to at least one other platform. It is confusing
Seafile: Filesharing that's pretty great Seafile is a piece of software that I use every day that I find exceedingly handy. The elevator pitch is something along the lines of "Like Dropbox, but self-hosted, with versioning."
xobs.io Promising URLs for the future A statement floating around on Twitter is that "A URL is a promise". A fine sentiment, and I hope that link continues to work in the future. The Internet is not
novena Novena-as-a-Keyboard There's just something magical about watching text flow along a screen. It's the basis for Defcon boards made popular by the movie Wargames, and is popular in the background of most movies. It's
Palawan: Part Selection and Schematics When starting a project, the first step is obviously to decide what it should do. Do you want to do a light blinker or a laptop? Maybe you have something prototyped already on
palawan Introducing: Project Palawan I want to learn more about hardware design, and the best way to learn something is to do it. I've started work on a new project to create an easy-to-use hardware input platform.
Novena Beta Repo I have a private Novena repo of my own that contains packages that have not yet been released, but are good enough for testing. They may be unreliable in certain ways and have
novena Desktop Factory Test We've just shipped the desktop factory test off to the assembly line, and they'll soon begin the process of turning bare boards into desktop models. We ran the initial factory test -- the
senoko Senoko Battery Board as a Device The Senoko battery board contains an STM32 chip, and runs its own separate operating system. The computer itself has 10 kilobytes of RAM and 64 kilobytes of storage space, where the operating system
novena Factory test We're doing the factory runs in batches, since there are multiple configurations of boards. Every board that leaves the factory will start out life as a "bare board", and will have features added
novena Novena First Run Right now, I'm in the middle of packaging up various bits and bobs for the final Novena disk image. We have a kernel mostly decided, and we have a base set of packages.
novena Novena progress: RTC, Headphone, Suspend When designing your own laptop, the most mundane of things become exceptional. When you get something working, life becomes that little bit sweeter. Like cracking your knuckles, or getting that bit of food
novena Audio driver merged The es8328 audio codec driver has been accepted by the ASoC maintainer. That means the driver will make its way upstream, and should land in Linus' tree in a few weeks. One more
novena Progress report: Sleep, Audio, and Power It's been a month since my last post, and things are moving along. We've been hard at work improving both the hardware and software. There's a backer update describing much of what we've