It's been a while since the last update, but lots of boards have been getting built, new features implemented and tested, and general fun had all around. Perhaps some of those details will be a post for another day. The most interesting board this time around is the IoT soldering iron: To be mor...
It's been a (long) while since the last blog update on this project, and it's been a chaotic last few months where a lot has happened (and a lot is still happening!) But the headline item is that I've been moving more towards a release of this project and gave a talk at Open Hardware Summit - see...
The last two weeks have been conference season, with a demo at UIST and a paper at SCF (Symposium on Computational Fabrication). In particular, if you're been following the prior posts on array ports and multipacking, that's the topic of the paper and it's presented in a much more unified and...
While the circuit board HDL compiler and examples have been open-source since we published our UIST'20 paper, we've only recently started rapidly building examples and been able to get the libraries to where this whole system could be more widely used. And as part that push towards release, we've...
It's been a while since my last post, and although there has been some interesting work on more example designs (which just got sent to fab 🎉) that'll be another post for another day, hopefully with some fun videos. But today, we revisit an old friend: refactoring the compiler. Again. IntelliJ...
While there has been much work on example boards and core logic over the past months, that work has exposed limitations and UI quirks that have impeded work. Now that the main features are done, it's time decompress and clean up some of that cruft, in particular to maintain development velocity goin...
My last few blog posts have been about bringing up example boards designed in our HDL, especially ones incorporating the new features of port arrays and multipack devices. Some of them were more toy examples and intended as proofs-of-concepts (like the LED matrix), while others were more practical...
Boards sent out a while ago have finally come back, and they are working! Above is the charlieplexed LED matrix board with a basic firmware load that draws a smiley face on the LED matrix. It also allows the user to select a different image (just a frowning face for now, but it needs a duck) t...
One again, using custom test equipment (the DC supplies at the top and bottom) ... to bring up custom test equipment (the BLE multimeter at the center)! This time around, there's no blue wires, and things generally went according to plan. The one place where things didn't go according to plan (an...
Can you spot the difference from last week's board design (I mean, aside from the duck 🦆 moving)? Right above the LEDs, instead of 4 resistors, there's now 2 4-pack resistors (RN1 and RN2). Up to this point, the board design HDL followed a pretty strict hierarchy block design structure. Hierar...