Designed to fail: Ethernet for FPGA-PC communication

Just lucky? I’ve been approached a few times with requests to design the FPGA part of an FPGA-to-PC link over Ethernet. The purpose of the link is typically transporting a large amount of data to the PC. The application varies from continuous data acquisition to frame grabbing or transport of a raw video image stream. [...]

Linux / Gnome: Turning two extra mouse buttons into Copy/Paste commands

The goal Use my Microsoft mouse’s two extra buttons to do Copy and Paste on a Fedora 12 machine (Gnome 2.28.2). The problem is that different applications have different keystrokes. But the nice thing is that almost all applications will respond properly to Alt-e c for copy (that is, open the “Edit” menu, and choose [...]

Enabling openGL 3D rendering on Fedora 12

In short: I’ve known for a long time that OpenGL wasn’t working on my graphics card, and the display was indeed sluggish. The problem is most easily shown by going $ glxinfo | grep OpenGL OpenGL vendor string: Mesa Project OpenGL renderer string: Software Rasterizer OpenGL version string: 2.1 Mesa 7.7.1-DEVEL OpenGL shading language version [...]

Examples of SDMA-assembler for Freescale i.MX51

These are a couple of examples of SDMA assembly code, which performs data copy using the DMA functional unit. The first one shows how to copy data from application memory space to SDMA memory. The second example copies data from one application memory chunk to another, and hence works as an offload memcpy(). To actually [...]

ARM running Linux talking easily with a Xilinx FPGA

Unless your embedded application happens to be a router, there’s some application-dependent electronics you need to talk with. If some SoC device covers your needs, that’s always nice, but what about that specific piece of electronics? And what if your application includes a part that needs to be run on an FPGA? Making a processor [...]

“Happy Birthday” in Hebrew. The Barbershop version.

As voicemail messages often go here in Israel: The Hebrew message will be followed by an English one. עברית לפני מספר שנים, כתבתי עיבוד לשיר יום ההולדת המוכר “היום יום הולדת” למקהלת גברים (למעשה, רביעיית ברברשופ). בראייה לאחור (או האזנה, ליתר דיוק) הדמיון העיקרי לברברשופ הוא בכך שהמנגינה נמצאת אצל הטנור השני, וגם האיזון בין [...]