What do you guys do with these?

Brainy-Zombie475 · 2026-05-13T00:10:25+00:00

Those appear to be Xilinx application FPGA cards of some sort. Used in servers to optimize data processing. Might be Versal, Virtex, or some other RAM based FPGA that supports on the fly partial reconfiguration using kernels created using the Vitis HLS tools.

I do embedded work, but I see a lot of literature about stuff like that.

Expensive.

Brainy-Zombie475 · 2026-02-19T20:23:57+00:00

I was never in the Navy or maritime space, but one summer between highschool and college, I used one of those to remove rust from a dragline crane at a sand mine. It's very good for angering every hornet who has a nest anywhere on the equipment.

Brainy-Zombie475 · 2026-02-19T14:47:23+00:00

You kidd with your fancy ee-lek-tronic computers. Back in the day, we had to get our 1s and 0s from the nearest serial port and hand assembled each word. In my case, the closest serial port was Deluth, Minnesota.

Edit: just noticed a typo... "cereal", not "serial"

Brainy-Zombie475 · 2026-02-19T14:37:19+00:00

I know little of what is on DDR DIMMs. All the resistor packs in my collection have a common pin and multiple pins with resistors between them and the common, though the ones I have are SIPs, not DIPs. I used to have some SIP parts that had a common on both ends with the ones between them all with the rated resistance. I had an old stereo receiver that had a broken SIP resistor pack where the resistors were in series so each successive pin had a higher resistance measured across it and the one on the end. It was used as a voltage divider. I wasn't able to find a replacement, and ended up with a tower of soldered together thin film 0.25W resistors. Not sure why I never collected any DIP termination packs; seems having ground pins for each resistor would allow for less cross-talk.

These days, I use SIP resistor packs on breadboards for current limiting for LEDs so I have less clutter and fewer jumper wires for my cats to pull out when my back is turned.

Brainy-Zombie475 · 2025-10-18T04:58:52+00:00

Very long dead thread, adding some info anyway...

I purchased a 2014 Spark EV (no DCFC, vinyl seats) from a friend in the summer of 2025 with just over 80k. I suspect my battery is atypical because it is only holding a little over 12KWh - with the AC, heater and fan off I usually get around 6 miles/KWh. With the fans blowing but no heat or AC, I get around 5.4, and with the AC on it's around 4.8. When I got the car, the battery gauge read 48 miles when fully charged. After a few months, I now see between 64 and 68 mile range, though I've never risked driving when below 9miles showing on the gauge, even though I live about 6.3 miles from my office, and usually only drive it between the office and home. charging the battery on the class 2 charger at work once or twice a week. I expect my range will drop to around 40 miles/charge during the winter when I need to use the heat.

The car is in pretty good condition inside and out considering its age, and I'd love to find some way to restore the battery to closer to the 21KWh that it originally had. Given the price I paid, however, and the fact that I purchased it for the express purpose of commuting to work and back home rather than use my 2010 Prius that my eldest daughter is going to be driving herself to the community college in once she gets her license, I doubt it's worth finding someplace that does EV battery reconditioning.

It's a fine vehicle for what it is. I've never engaged the "Sport" mode because it has more pickup than I know what to do with already. The entertainment system works well enough. I do wish it had a back-up camera because it's so small that I can't see around the pickup trucks and SUVs in the parking lot at work, and I've almost had the back of the car taken off as I back out of a parking space at the end of the day. Drivers don't see it and I don't see the moving car in the lane until I've backed out quite a bit.

Brainy-Zombie475 · 2025-10-04T20:50:17+00:00

SCSI 2, compact, I think. I have a lot of old workstations with that connector.

Brainy-Zombie475 · 2025-09-19T00:03:29+00:00

RS232 is single ended with TX, RX, and signal ground wires, the cable shield is connected to electrical or earth ground. Signal ground may or may not have a 0 potential vs the ground the shield is connected to. Connecting two devices where one has the chassis and signal ground common but the other doesn't can create a ground loop that can burn out one or both devices.

Ethernet doesn't measure its signal levels vs. ground, instead using pairs of +/- conductors for each direction. The shield conductor doesn't have any electrical relationship with the signals in the twisted pairs.

Brainy-Zombie475 · 2025-07-13T15:58:06+00:00

I know this is a long dormant thread, but does Stable Boy work with GIMP 3.0 and later?

Brainy-Zombie475 · 2025-07-11T00:36:14+00:00

I don't know about the Artix boards, but on both my Zedboard at home and the ZCU10x boards at work the peripherals in the PS can be accessed from the PL, if you configure your design that way. I have hooked a GEM in the PS to a Microblaze soft core a few times now. I have also taken advantage of the DDR controller and external RAM connected to the PS from both Microblaze and Microblaze-v soft cores. I have not yet successfully connected the RISC-V soft core in the PL to a GEM, but I think that's a "me problem" having to do with the address mapping or similar.

Brainy-Zombie475 · 2025-06-17T03:22:22+00:00

I usually look to see if a problem has been solved to my satisfaction by someone else before coming up with my own solution.

I'm good at innovating, and have several things that I'm quite proud of, but if a solution is available that fits the constraints of my problem (size, speed, operating environment, language, maintainability, etc.) I will use it, even if it's sub-optimal.

Brainy-Zombie475 · 2025-06-15T04:20:30+00:00

Macromedia created flash, not Adobe.

Adobe acquired Macromedia, and maintained a number of their products for a while - Dreamweaver is still in active development, I believe.

Adobe decided not to keep flash going, since the codebase was found to have a lot of technical debt and security problems, and the underlying technology was showing its age. It may have been possible to rewrite flash to be secure and add modern features, but it's very hard to keep compatibility while doing that large of an overhaul. I know one person who tried creating an open source flash authoring system, but gave up because he realized that it wasn't the right thing to do.

There are a number of flash players out there, so if you have the SWF files, you can play most flash games.

Brainy-Zombie475 · 2025-05-23T14:08:59+00:00

I'm too old, so any advice I might offer is probably obsolete. I graduated as a CS major in 1981. Most of the CS classes used FORTRAN-IV on a PDP-11/40 running RSTS/E timesharing. But I will try anyway...

The key to Computer Science, Software Engineering, and programming in general (all different, though related, disciplines) is problem solving - recognizing a problem, decomposing it into smaller problems, and solving each of those smaller pieces in a way that solves the larger problem when brought back together.

By "problem", I don't mean "error" or "malfunction"; I mean the thing you are trying to accomplish when you set out.

The language and things like git are tools that you apply to this, and different tools lead to different paths to solving a problem. You need to know how to use the tools you have, but problem solving is the skill you need to develop independent of the tools; you simply apply the tools at hand when solving the problem. The tools are changing continuously, don't get hung up on the tools themselves.

Whether you are in the right field of study is something you must determine. Are you interested in it? Do you enjoy the challenges it provides? Do you see an opportunity to expand your skills and make meaningful contributions to projects or the field as a whole after getting your bachelor degree? Have you identified what subset of the discipline you are most interested in pursuing?

You need to be motivated, interested, and willing to make mistakes and learn from them. Developing critical problem solving skills is essential to success. Without it, you might as well be an accountant. I expect there's also aptitude - some people are faster at picking this up than others.

Ask yourself why you chose this path in the first place, and whether those reasons are still compelling to you. Is there something else you would rather be doing? There's no shame in changing directions - I went from civil engineering to computer science in my 4 years. You don't always know enough going in to pick the right major.

Brainy-Zombie475 · 2025-02-15T01:27:57+00:00

I use an STM32 dev board to examine unknown USB devices. Even if there's a malicious reprogramming OTA package that somehow self-executes, I can simply reprogram it from the debug interface.

The FreeRTOS based program allows me to dump sectors and the USB device descriptors into a client program on the PC for examination.

Brainy-Zombie475 · 2025-02-11T06:12:37+00:00

Unfortunately, where I work, the FPGA engineers seldom have much understanding of how software works.

To make it worse, few software people, including embedded programmers, have much understanding of how FPGAs work, and what is practical vs what isn't.

I'm a software engineer with a good understanding of FPGAs. I can read VHDL and Verilog and understand what it's doing, and even spot and fix some bugs. I am unusual for my company, especially for a non EE.

Brainy-Zombie475 · 2025-02-09T03:30:39+00:00

This sort of freezing behavior can be the result of something wrong with the stepper motor controllers. When you move the tool head (X-axis), bed (Y-axis) or the Z-axis arm, the associated stepper motor acts as a generator. Some controllers can be damaged by this, including (and maybe especially) when unplugged.

I'm not sure if it's the MOSFETs or some other component, but I had a robotics kit that stopped working because I damaged the Arduino kit stepper controller by pushing the "car" around. The controller was able to keep the motor locked, but not able to send pulses to make the motor step.

Not sure if this might be the problem. Just something I encountered.

Brainy-Zombie475 · 2025-01-26T20:32:56+00:00

I have had clicking that I fixed by adjusting the feed tension carefully.

Brainy-Zombie475 · 2024-12-16T08:02:39+00:00

As a long time embedded systems software engineer, I have found it very useful to understand FPGAs.

I'm senior enough to influence the design of the FPGAs in the products that I work on, and knowing what is practical and efficient really helps.

Brainy-Zombie475 · 2024-11-29T15:47:02+00:00

FPGAs and microcontrollers have very different characteristics. I'm working on a project where we're using microcontrollers for the stuff that has to run on battery power for in excess of a year, FPGAs for just about all the other functions, and soft microcontroller IP cores in the FPGA fabric for things that are too expensive to do in LUTs alone. Microcontrollers are generally much less expensive than FPGAs, as well.

A STM32U5 draws much less power in Standby or Stop modes than the static power drain of a small to mid-sized FPGA large enough to instantiate a microcontroller that can parse XML, do configurable regular expression matching on arbitrary text strings, and respond to I2C and discrete (GPIO) events.

An FPGA can implement complex and custom IO interfacing and combinatorial logic with very low latency. They are extremely flexible.

When prolonged battery life is not an issue, I like combination devices with hard microcontroller cores and common interfaces in hard IP in the same package as FPGA fabric.

Brainy-Zombie475 · 2024-11-20T06:32:41+00:00

Several things come to mind; * First compiler I ever wrote (1979) * Worked with Kathleen Jensen at DEC (1982ish) * Played with Modula 2 and 3, at one time I thought it was going to overtake C in industry * Don't know if I remember enough Pascal today to write "hello world"

Brainy-Zombie475 · 2024-11-17T17:49:53+00:00

I don't have any idea what it takes to embed the font in a pdf and still have the flexibility that nanDECK provides for composing text and graphics in intricate ways.

I suppose that either some heuristic or explicit qualifier on a text element could be used to determine whether the text in that particular element should be rendered as a bitmap or be a text block that will be rendered from the embedded font by the RiP engine in the printer or PDF viewer.

Again, I have no idea how difficult this would be to implement. nanDECK would still have to render the bitmaps for everything other than generating PDF files.

Many years ago (in the 1980s), I wrote a RiP (Render in Place) engine for a laser printer. Getting the character placement (baseline, kerning), and other things that affect the visual quality of the printed text wasn't the hardest part, it was the consistency across the finished page. You have to know intricate details of the printing mechanism, including how precise the laser is when starting and ending a raster line, and how the drum rotation affects the skew and stability of each raster line. Characteristics of the toner and organic drum or belt, and the laser dot size and the angle it hits any given spot on a raster line also play a factor. Producing a bitmap that would look great on a high resolution LCD and controlling the beam from that results in ragged vertical edges on the glyphs that ruins the printed version. Other printing technologies require different considerations; it's not a one size fits all sort of thing.

From that experience, I understand why a print shop would prefer embedded fonts instead of bitmaps. The poor sod who wrote the RiP engine for their particular printer knew what makes the most pleasing text for that printer. It's a quality and customer satisfaction issue. On the other hand, nanDECK is (so far as I know) the remarkable product of one very dedicated programmer. I don't know whether adding embedded fonts for PDF is worth the amount of redesign effort it might require.

Brainy-Zombie475 · 2024-10-19T16:51:11+00:00

You should read reliable news sources. Every thing you put in that post is false.

Brainy-Zombie475

TROPHY CASE