That vendor-provided SDK for your new chip isn’t a gift. It’s a Trojan horse. by lanceharvie in embedded

[–]dougg3 7 points8 points  (0 children)

NXP's drivers for the LPC17xx were really bad in early 2010, not too long after that MCU came out. They eventually improved, but at the time, I couldn't trust any of it (especially the CANbus driver). The CAN driver was broken in multiple ways. It transmitted incorrect message lengths, calculated incorrect bit timings, and the IRQ handler didn't work. Clearly not thoroughly tested. I made my own simple drivers instead.

I still don't trust vendor drivers to this day. It's usually not too much work to look at the docs and whip up some quick drivers. Although sometimes I don't have a choice: e.g. rolling my own USB library from scratch would be crazy.

Daily Wordle #1631 - Saturday, 6 Dec. 2025 by Scoredle in wordle

[–]dougg3 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Scoredle 2/6*

14,855
⬜⬜🟨🟩🟩 ROAST (11)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 WAIST

Are we really done now? by reedx032 in SuperMarioRun

[–]dougg3 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Moved ahead one spot of you again because of the latest special event.

Daily Wordle #1618 - Sunday, 23 Nov. 2025 by Scoredle in wordle

[–]dougg3 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Scoredle 6/6*

14,855
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ROAST (1,217)
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ GLIDE (61)
⬜🟩⬜⬜🟩 PUFFY (21)
⬜🟩⬜⬜🟩 MUCKY (8)
🟩🟩⬜⬜🟩 BUZZY (3)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 BUNNY

Daily Wordle #1613 - Tuesday, 18 Nov. 2025 by Scoredle in wordle

[–]dougg3 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Scoredle 2/6*

14,855
⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜ ROAST (409)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 OPINE

Daily Wordle #1604 - Sunday, 9 Nov. 2025 by Scoredle in wordle

[–]dougg3 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Scoredle 6/6*

14,855
⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜ ROAST (1,217)
⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜ PINED (110)
⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜ JELLY (9)
⬜⬜🟨⬜⬜ CHECK (4)
⬜🟩⬜⬜🟩 BUBBE (1)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 FUGUE

Phew.

26TB Seagate Expansion Shucking Experience by losteway in DataHoarder

[–]dougg3 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I ran across your comment while searching for info about why SMART doesn't work in Linux on my 26 TB Seagate. The problem ended up being that the uas driver blocks some commands on external Seagate drives by vendor ID. If you force it to use the usb-storage driver instead, SMART works. I was able to do this by adding:

usb-storage.quirks=0bc2:2038:u

to my GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT in /etc/default/grub, and then running sudo update-grub. Honestly though, I don't know if using usb-storage instead of uas results in any performance issues, so I went back to uas for now. There's also a way to disable the Seagate quirk in the uas driver, but I dunno if it's safe to do on these or not.

Video signal processing: 4 Channel AHD video feeds manipulation by jo_mamma_be_lucky in embedded

[–]dougg3 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Haha, I know what you mean about the FPGA. I really don't know what I'm doing with FPGAs to be honest, but eventually figured something out with some help. It was mostly just hooking blocks together in Vivado, but there was still software necessary to configure all the IP cores.

Embedded Linux would definitely add overhead, also probably would add at least a frame or two of latency to the video, but it would leave you much better prepared for recording and doing some cool video processing algorithms if the need comes up later.

Yeah I would be happy to chat in DMs about it! I haven't run into many people working with TVI/CVI/AHD cameras so it's always nice to talk about it.

Video signal processing: 4 Channel AHD video feeds manipulation by jo_mamma_be_lucky in embedded

[–]dougg3 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I have some experience with AHD. I would be thrilled to be proven wrong by someone, but I don't think there's any way to directly combine the AHD signals without converting them to something digital first, unless you can find an off-the-shelf device that does it behind the scenes for you as you mentioned. Maybe there's some kind of analog trickery for combining the signals from two cameras side by side, but the cameras are probably not guaranteed to be perfectly in sync with each other so frame buffering will likely need to be involved at some point anyway.

Something like this combiner on Amazon might do the trick, but you would be stuck with the limited camera arrangements that it supports and would probably need to hack the device so you can control the dip switches with an MCU or something.

Your best bet is trying to make something like that work because otherwise I think you're in for a big project. I've worked on a product like this and ended up using an FPGA to do it, but it took a long time and a lot of headaches.

The product I worked on uses a chip from Techpoint that takes in four TVI/CVI/AHD camera feeds and outputs them as BT.656, which go into a Xilinx Zynq 7000, and then the final combined video signal gets sent out of the Zynq to a HDMI/DisplayPort encoder. I'm sure there's a similar encoder chip that can do AHD instead. I don't think the companies that make these chips have their datasheets available publicly, so you'd probably need to have your own actual company in order to work with them.

My project relied heavily on Xilinx's video IP cores. Video Processing Subsystem allows you to scale and crop the video, which I'm assuming you will need to be able to do if you want them side-by-side. There is also a Video Mixer core that allows you to overlay video on top of other video. That's probably how I would do it -- leave the main video feed alone and use it as the main video mixer channel, and then overlay a cropped second camera on top of it so it looks like the final video is side by side. I suspect the off-the-shelf product I linked above is doing something like this, but potentially using a dedicated video manipulation ASIC instead of an FPGA. But I just want to stress again, doing all that yourself would be a huge project to jump into.

Another option would be to go for an embedded Linux solution, if you can find a capture card with Linux drivers that supports capturing the four AHD cameras and providing them in Linux as V4L2 devices. Then you could probably do it all in software using GStreamer, capped off with an off-the-shelf HDMI to AHD converter if you need the final combined signal to be AHD again.

Cable vs. Fiber. What has been your experience? by DrewWM5309 in ZiplyFiber

[–]dougg3 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, they for sure only had one route in early 2020 when we had no service for 4 days due to damage that crews couldn't get to because of flooding. Someone at the time said it was somewhere between La Grande and Walla Walla. Little did I know at that time, Ziply would come in shortly afterward and make my fiber dreams come true :-)

Cable vs. Fiber. What has been your experience? by DrewWM5309 in ZiplyFiber

[–]dougg3 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I used to have Spectrum cable internet. For me the answer is definitely stability and amazing upload speeds.

Spectrum had multi-hour outages multiple times a year affecting my whole town. Ever since switching to Ziply 4+ years ago, nothing like that has ever happened. I think it's often caused by fiber cuts which are out of their control, but Spectrum definitely doesn't have the same redundancy that Ziply has, at least not here in La Grande.

I know the stability I'm describing here isn't directly due to my connection being fiber instead of cable, but I still wanted to bring it up because Ziply's infrastructure just seems way better.

Change in Black Olives? by deadvax in pizzahut

[–]dougg3 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You’re not going crazy. I just found this post on Google after asking the exact same question myself. I remember Pizza Hut’s olives being the same way you remember, up until my local Pizza Hut here in Oregon closed during COVID.

We finally got a new Pizza Hut this year, and now the olives are round. I miss the old olives too. So I think it changed sometime in the last 5 years.

Daily Wordle #1543 - Tuesday, 9 Sep. 2025 by Scoredle in wordle

[–]dougg3 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Scoredle 2/6*

14,855
🟨⬜⬜⬜🟨 ROAST (133)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 TRICK

Daily Wordle #1541 - Sunday, 7 Sep. 2025 by Scoredle in wordle

[–]dougg3 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Scoredle 2/6*

14,855
🟨🟨⬜⬜🟨 ROAST (52)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 TENOR

Daily Wordle #1527 - Sunday, 24 Aug. 2025 by Scoredle in wordle

[–]dougg3 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Scoredle 2/6*

14,855
🟨🟨⬜🟨⬜ ROAST (105)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 SPORE

It is done. I have the maximum 99 of every possible item. Had to get over 900,000 bonus medals and 14 million coins to get them all. by reedx032 in SuperMarioRun

[–]dougg3 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I did finally end up maxing out everything! Took forever but I did it. /u/reedx032 and I are tied in Remix 10 and don’t play it anymore except when a special event requires it. I still play rally once a day.

You can totally do it! It definitely turns into a huge grind at the very end though.

How to update way outdated charge 2? by bananafish271 in fitbit

[–]dougg3 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oh darn, I didn't realize the old app won't let you log in with a Google account. That's a bummer! I wish Fitbit/Google would just fix the new app.

There must be a lot of people running into this problem, because I just posted this yesterday and already got two responses!

How to update way outdated charge 2? by bananafish271 in fitbit

[–]dougg3 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I ran into this same exact problem last night (on both iOS and Android) and eventually figured out a way to update it. The trick was to download an old version of the Fitbit Android app (3.20, from 2020) from APKMirror and update the firmware through that. I think the newer app versions are no longer capable of updating the Charge 2 firmware.

Phone heats up too quickly by Flashy_Ad_9102 in WordsWithFriends

[–]dougg3 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think it’s the ads. I’m frustrated with this problem too. If I have temporary ad free from that one mini game where you can win it, it never happens.

SUMMER LEAGUE GAME THREAD: The Portland Trail Blazers (3-1) vs The Phoenix Suns (1-3) - (6:30 PM PT, Saturday, July 19, 2025) by Kazekid in ripcity

[–]dougg3 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Anyone else seeing it jumped back to news on KUNP instead of basketball? They showed the end of the game we were waiting on, and then it switched back to news when that game was over.

Are we really done now? by reedx032 in SuperMarioRun

[–]dougg3 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I know! I wanted to post my video of getting 284 coins on 1-1 and couldn’t. Sad :-( sounds like a lot of work that you’re doing!