Introduction Do you recognize the letters in the example image above? If you do, I suppose you’re a Hebrew speaker. And since the letters are shown in handwriting style, just a Hebrew keyboard is not enough, since the keys are marked with type-style letters. With basic Hebrew skills, the translation is obvious. Others will have [...]
Having made several FPGA projects for my clients, I’ve learned that most of them are reluctant to use the Xilinx FPGA Editor. While most seem to realize that’s it’s a valuable tool, few really grasp the enormous advantage it offers, in particular when debugging FPGA designs: The possibilities to view the FPGA down to the [...]
I love LaTeX. It’s my preferred tool whenever I need to write a document in English. But it had one little problem: The documents it generated, even though beautifully typeset, had an academic look. For someone who submits the documents to hitec companies, an engineering-like look was more appealing. So I wrote my own document [...]
Here’s a problem I encounter in several fields: Find the local maxima and minima in some noisy signal, which typically looks like the following graph: The local maxima and minima are plotted as red and green stars on the graph. To the eye it’s so obvious where they are, but making a computer find them [...]
I’m using MATLAB since about 1992. One of the things that I’ve always missed, as a communication engineer, is a quick and dirty spectrum plot of signals. I want to see what the spectrum analyzer will show me when I’ll run the signal through it, and not some analytic plot, which looks nothing like. The [...]
Introduction 2022 update: This is probably quite pointless today, but that’s not reason enough to delete this post. cdepend is a cross-reference utility, whose main purpose is mapping which function calls which in a C language project. As projects grow and develop, it becomes harder and harder to keep track of which functions are actually [...]
Frandom is a Linux kernel random number generator, which is 10-50 times faster than what you get from Linux’ built-in /dev/urandom. And it uses very little (/dev/frandom) or none (/dev/erandom) of the kernel’s entropy pool, so it is very useful for applications that require a handy source for lots of random data. Its most common [...]
Eobj is a Perl programming environment. Well, technically speaking, it’s a Perl module. Eobj stands for Easy Objects. Idea: Object oriented programming is supported very well in Perl, but it requires some rather advanced programming techniques: Perl modules and namespaces, references, blessings and some syntactic sugars. In addition, the awareness of some special variables is [...]
Somewhere in 2006 TI (Texas Instruments) released a clock synthesizer, CDCE906, which is pretty much everything one can look for in a system clock generator: Several (up to 6) clock outputs derived from a single reference clock or crystal with excellent multiplication and division capabilities, not to mention low jitter, slew rate control, spread spectrum [...]
Perlilog is a command-line tool which generates Verilog modules from a set of files, which come in several other formats. It was originally designed to integrate Verilog IP cores. It’s released as free software (GPL). Motivation: Anyone who has needed to integrate a few Verilog modules into something working, knows it’s a headache. It’s not [...]
