2018-08-06
Instead of doing real work I was messing around with Dia to see what kind of perdy additions to the documentation I could create. Well here is the glory that took me almost an hour to produce. To be fair I haven’t used Dia in close to a decade and my new mouse pad realllly sucks. Lets unpack that image in the most logical way – starting from the bottom left and then meandering around. Read more…
2018-08-04
Been working on the software side of things. The goal was to put together a logger for all of the sensor data. For that I had to make logic core expose all of its various values. Not a super huge deal, but had to remember the code base from 6 months ago. Document your code, kids. Below are a couple of screen shots of the qtHMI_SHIM which is my playground and reference implementation for all Read more…
2018-07-21
It’s alive! So it’s been a while. Basically when revision D of the PCB came in is when I tore my lab apart for a remodel. Well good news for everyone especially Neal (the dog) – the remodel is done and I’m back to pretending I know what I’m doing with a soldering iron. The major changes between revisions C and D of the board were the following. More details on each item to follow. Read more…
2017-12-30
Note: I was wrong in the last post. It’s the dsPIC that has a broken UART, not the PIC24. For the last month I have been doing the very unsexy work of grinding out bugs in the code. As I hinted at before my software stack had issues under load. I chose to test the full stack (hardware and software) by subjecting it to a completely unrealistic load. The logic behind it is that the Read more…
2017-11-18
I have been working on finishing up the software related to the board. The only feature that I had left on my wish-list was implementing the calibration stuff. The goal was to have the calibration offset be stored in EEPROM and for it to be adjustable via the text/cli interface and via the binary protocol. The process was going to touch the graphical interface piece, the middle-ware that sits between the interface and the board, Read more…
2017-10-22
I am a firm believer that the tool a man uses to should conform to the man not the other way around. If, for example, I need to remove a Phillips-head screw I will not take a slotted screwdriver and forge it into a Phillips-head screwdriver. I will take a Phillips-head screwdriver and use that. In other words I will use a tool that is conformed to the me and my current need rather than Read more…
2017-09-17
So I am going to go ahead and open with this. Those are the stats for the ‘LOGIC_CORE’ piece of the software stack. For those not fluent in gibberish, what this shows that after an hour of something like half-dozen threads grinding away at the IO board communicating with an “end user” process no memory errors have been encountered. No out of bounds writes, nothing was lost after allocation, etc. What this means is that Read more…
2017-09-02
Note: Last time I did web development was in 2010 or thereabouts. At the time I was up to my ass in JSP, servlets, beans, rice, J2EE, jQuery, etc. So I’ve been out of the game for a bit. I certainly hope that I’m missing something. Some sort of piece of underlying logic that ties all of the nonsense together and converts it from “uhmmm this is kind of bulshit” to “oh ok that makes Read more…
2017-08-15
So it works. My IO board that has been in development for 7+ months works. The hardware works. Sure there are some warts that need to be addressed in revision C, but it works. It is functional. The firmware works. The CLI-style human interface works and the binary machine interface works. Sure there are some warts, but it works. The Linux portions, the multi-threaded, multi-process, bi-directional serial stack, and misc works. The human interface component Read more…
2017-07-31
I’ve made a huge mistake While waiting for my boards to come back from fabrication (they should be here tomorrow OMG SQUEEE) I decided to do some software work. Early on in the process I made a slight little design error. I made the piece of the stack that’s gonna live on the Beagle Bone a bit more complicated than it really should be. Naturally, rather than admitting my mistake I plowed forward. At this Read more…