azog | September 28, 2009
Got tired of the til311 clock sitting around nakid, so I tried to put it in an enclosure: This is a small cigar box, almost just the perfect size to fit the PCB. The board was about 0.5″ too big on the width, so I had to decide what to do: shave off the PCB, [...]
azog | September 8, 2009
Have you ever heard of, or seen, a til-311 display? These are interesting “mid-retro” displays. They can display hex digits (0-F), have both a left- and right- decimal point, and blanking and strobe inputs. The logic driver is built-in, which is the tiny circuit you see near the notch. Driving these displays is very easy [...]
azog | July 30, 2009
Ok, so this is nothing that hasn’t been done before. But I’ve been working on another project, and it is just driving me nuts, so I need to take a break from it, and do something else. Maybe not “simple”, but “achievable!” I ordered some LM34 temperature sensors to play with, and threw together an [...]
azog | July 25, 2009
I’ve been following Hack-A-Day’s bus pirate since I first read about it. I even went and had the artwork fabbed. So as soon as I saw that they were offering an all-new pre-built version, I ordered one up. It came today: My gosh, that is tiny! Haven’t played with it yet. See how far I [...]
azog | June 11, 2009
I’ve deleted some old posts, because some of them were futile, and the others were random. I’m going to be presumptuous and try to combine the info into a single, hopefully coherent, post. Presumptuous, because this is a “tutorial style” post, whereas I myself should be a reader of such tutorials, rather than an originator.
azog | April 11, 2009
I need to step back from trying to learn how to program this CPLD. This is way over my head, at a very deep level that is beyond me. I’ve looked at dozens of tutorials on Verilog and VHDL, and actually decided that ABEL is the way to go. But you’re pretty much working at [...]
azog | April 6, 2009
I love the AVR Dragon. Have I said that before? Well, I’ll say it again. At $50, you get a JTAG debugger, and it just doesn’t get any better than that. I think the JTAG-ICE cost like $300. And it’s not just for JTAG, it can do ISP and HVPP. It doesn’t support as many [...]
azog | April 4, 2009
Having gone through the previous steps of creating a project, etc, but not really knowing where the pins are physically connected, I needed to open my eyes a little better. The report from implementation gave a whole slew of information on the target, but I did not notice the “Pins” link on that report… So [...]
azog | April 4, 2009
Continuing on with my CPLD learning (or non-learning) adventure, I did something, but I’m not exactly sure what. Create a new project, with my target hardware I added no sources during project creation, and can add them later Once the empty project was created, I added a source. Several different types are available: VHDL, Verilog, [...]
azog | April 3, 2009
Playing around with the CPLD starter kit some more, I realize that I am so over my head it is not funny. To begin with, the software itself is confusing. There are several tools. One is the “ISE WebPACK”, which appears to be only for CPLDs, and is supposedly free. Another higher-level tool is the [...]