Posts

Learning FPGAs #1

I normally work at the system or electronic level, and one thing I’ve always wanted to learn is FPGAs and the corresponding HDLs. To pull this together, I plan to implement the 6502 using Verilog on an OrangeCrab board.

Faster posting

TL;DR: the minimal template is: --- title: "Faster posting" date: 2023-12-26 --- Content with no initial title Details: I’m using Hugo, which is a static site generator. Looks like it’s possible to post from gitea.

XT60 based charger

charger is a case for a no-name car charger that lets you use model aircraft batteries to charge your phone. The charger is quite nice. It’s panel mount and comes with a QC 3.

CH32V003 and Zephyr

CH32V003 and Zephyr I’ve picked up a CH32V003 development board. Their claim to fame is being a RISC-V 32 bit microcontroller with 16 KiB of flash for $0.10 in quantity. I’d like to port Zephyr to it - there’s no good reason as the default Zephyr configuration is too big for 16 KiB of flash and 2 KiB of RAM, but stripped down it fits quite well.

Gitjournal

GitJournal is very cool. It’s an Android app where you can write notes in Markdown and then sync up to your own Git repository. I was using NextCloud social for small private notes but that’s been abandoned.

nppilot using Ardupilot

I’ve been working on nppilot, the “never complete autopilot” project for some time now. The latest iteration uses a Traxxas Revo 1/16, an OpenPilot Revolution for I/O, and a Raspberry Pi 3B running ROS as the command computer.

VW to ABRP via Home Assistant

I have a Volkswagen ID series car that I’m pretty happy with. The car automatically uploads telemetry such as the current battery state of charge and, with a bit of work, this can be pulled into Home Assistant for viewing and then re-exported to A Better Route Planner to give live range planning.

Local SolaX data

I’ve recently installed a SolaX X1 Mini grid-tied inverter. This comes with a Wifi adapter and cloud offering where you can view the current system performance. This post covers how to redirect the underlying MQTT connection so you can read data from the inverter without data leaving your network.

Duckiebot debugging

I’ve picked up a Duckietown Duckiebot DB21M. Under the hood it’s a Linux SBC running ROS that talks to the HUT I/O board. There’s a nice host side set of utilities and Docker based tools that let you interact from a standard laptop.

ZX0

ZX0 is my Sinclar ZX81-like hobby computer. The idea is to make something in the ZX81 form factor, use a Raspberry Pi Zero for emulation, and then write some interesting apps that run on the emulator.