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Fomu: a beginner's guide

6 March, 2019

FPGAs are pretty cool pieces of hardware for tinkering with, and have become remarkably easy to approach as a hobbyist in recent years. Boards like the TinyFPGA BX don’t require any special hardware to use and can provide a simple platform for modestly-scoped projects or just for learning.

While historically the software tools for programming FPGAs are proprietary and provided by the hardware manufacturer, Symbiflow (enabled and probably inspired by earlier work like Project IceStorm) provides completely free and open-source tooling and documentation for programming some FPGAs, significantly lowering the cost of entry (most vendors provide some free version of their design software but limited to lower-end devices; a license for the non-free version of the software is well into the realm of “if you have to ask, you can’t afford it”) and appearing to yield better results in many cases.¹

As somebody who finds it fun to learn new things and experiment with new kinds of creations, FPGAs are quite interesting to me- they’re quite complex devices that enable very powerful creations, with excellent depth for mastery. While I did some course lab work with Altera FPGAs in university (and a little bit of chip design/layout later), I’d call those mostly canned tasks with easily-understood requirements and problem-solving approaches; it was sufficient to familiarize myself with the systems, but not enough to be particularly useful.

The announcement of Fomu caught my interest because I was aware of the earlier Tomu but wasn’t sufficiently interested to try to acquire any hardware. With Fomu however, I’m rather more interested because it enables interesting capabilities for playing with hardware- others have already demonstrated small RISC-V CPUs running in that FPGA (despite its modest logic capacity), for instance.

Even more conveniently for being able to play with Fomu, I’ve been in contact with Mithro who is approximately half of the team behind Fomu and gotten access to a stockpile of “hacker edition” boards that have been hand-assembled but not programmed at all. With slightly early access to hardware, I’ve been able to do some exploration and re-familiarize myself with the world of digital logic design and figure out the hardware.

Temperature Logging: Redux

22 August, 2018

Previously as I was experimenting with logging the temperature using a Raspberry Pi (to monitor the temperatures experienced by fermenting cider), I noted that the Pi was something of a terrible hack, and it should be possible to do more efficiently with some slightly less common hardware.

I decided that improved version would be interesting to build for use at home, since it’s both kind of fun to collect data like that, and actually knowing the temperature in the house is useful at times. The end result of this project is that I can generate graphs like the one below of conditions around the house:

Three graphs of temperature, barometric presure and humidity spanning a week, where each graph has three lines; one each for the lounge, bedroom and entry. Temperature shows a diurnal cycle with mostly constant offsets between lines, presure is equal for each and varies slowly over the entire week, and humidity is broadly similar between the three lines and varies somewhat more randomly.

Building a terrible 'IoT' temperature logger

31 July, 2018

I had approximately the following exchange with a co-worker a few days ago:

Them: “Hey, do you have a spare Raspberry Pi lying around?”
Me: [thinks] “..yes, actually.”
T: “Do you want to build a temperature logger with Prometheus and a DS18B20+?
M: “Uh, okay?”

It later turned out that that co-worker had been enlisted by yet another individual to provide a temperature logger for their project of brewing cider, to monitor the temperature during fermentation. Since I had all the hardware at hand (to wit, a Raspberry Pi 2 that I wasn’t using for anything and temperature sensors provided by the above co-worker), I threw something together. It also turned out that the deadline was quite short (brewing began just two days after this initial exchange), but I made it work in time.

Considering my backup systems

7 November, 2017

With the recent news that Crashplan were doing away with their “Home” offering, I had reason to reconsider my choice of online backup backup provider. Since I haven’t written anything here lately and the results of my exploration (plus description of everything else I do to ensure data longevity) might be of interest to others looking to set up backup systems for their own data, a version of my notes from that process follows. The status quo I run a Linux-based home server for all of my long-term storage, currently 15 terabytes of raw storage with btrfs RAID on top. The choice of btrfs and RAID allows me some degree of robustness against local disk failures and accidental damage to data.

Reflecting on Breath of the Wild

11 June, 2017

I’ve been enjoying The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild recently, and reflected some on what makes it interesting to me from a non-gameplay perspective. This document is a version of those musings organized for publication, though perhaps less well organized than my usual writings- I am by no means a skilled critic, but spending longer in composing this would likely just delay its completion to little benefit. Note that at the time of this writing I have not yet completed the game, but there are still some minor spoilers for the early portions of the game and general premise.

An illustrated guide to LLVM

16 May, 2017

At the most recent Rust Sydney meetup (yesterday, “celebrating” Rust’s second birthday) I gave a talk intended to provide an introduction to using LLVM to build compilers, using Rust as the implementing language. The presentations were not recorded which might have been neat, but I’m publishing the slides and notes here for anybody who might find it interesting or useful. It is however not as illustrated as the title may seem to suggest. It’s embedded below, or you can view standalone in your browser or as a PDF, available with or without presenter notes. Navigate with the arrow keys on your keyboard or by swiping.

Evaluating async I/O

28 February, 2017

A common belief among software engineers of a certain temperament seems to be that asynchronous I/O is the only way to achieve good performance in a server application. There is also often confusion around async, since there are several ways in which it can appear: Async I/O; eventing async keywords in languages often using Promises async as a keyword is often useful, though most frequently in the context of evented I/O under the hood. Promises or Futures are very useful when taking advantage of parallelism, but many applications don’t take any advantage of doing that kind of parallelism- they instead adopt async structures and their disadvantages through a cargo-cult assertion that doing so will make the programs fast.

Quick and dirty web image optimization

23 February, 2017

Given a large pile of images that nominally live on a web server, I want to make them smaller and more friendly to serve to clients. This is hardly novel: for example, Google offer detailed advice on reducing the size of images for the web. I have mostly JPEG and PNG images, so, jpegtran and optipng are the tools of choice for bulk lossless compression. To locate and compress images, I’ll use GNU find and parallel to invoke those tools. For JPEGs I take a simple approach, preserving comment tags and creating a progressive JPEG (which can be displayed at a reduced resolution before the entire image has been downloaded).

sax-ng

27 May, 2016

Over on Cemetech, we’ve long had an embedded chat widget called “SAX” (“Simultaneous Asynchronous eXchange”). It behaves kind of like a traditional shoutbox, in that registered users can use the SAX widget to chat in near-real-time. There is also a bot that relays messages between the on-site widget and an IRC channel, which we call “saxjax”. The implementation of this, however, was somewhat lacking in efficiency. It was first implemented around mid-2006, and saw essentially no updates until just recently. The following is a good example of how dated the implementation was: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 // code for Mozilla, etc if (window.

Web history archival and WARC management

17 January, 2016

I’ve been a sort of ‘rogue archivist’ along the lines of the Archive Team for some time, but generally lack the combination of motivation and free time to directly take part in their activities. That said, I do sometimes go on bursts of archival since these things do concern me; it’s just a question of when I’ll get manic enough to be useful and latch onto an archival task as the one to do. An earlier public example is when I mirrored ticalc.org. The historical record contains plenty of instances where people maintained copies of their communications or other documentation which has proven useful to study, and in the digital world the same is likely to be true.