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Hi, and welcome.

 

This attempts to be a free-form, (mostly un-cohosted) podcast about tech-oriented hobby-projects. Do not proceed if you're looking for a high-quality production.

On a semi-biweekly basis, Michai and optional cohost talk about software, electronics and mechanical engineering from a hands-on point of view. Most of the time, that means giving excuses for not having done any work at all.

Nov 2, 2018

Yay, after one year we're still polluting the virtual airwaves, so let's review the last year of podcasting (only takes about 8 minutes - don't cry).

RetroChallenge RC2018/09 has finished, so we take a look at its winners and honourable mentions. Minor topics include a Hackalot visit, USB nullmodem hack, breadboard fail and fried scope probe clip. I briefly tried to generate a VGA image from software, but why not do it using an FPGA next time?

Following convo deals with my initial experience with the Lattice ICEstick (iCE40HX1K) FPGA devboard, supported by a completely open toolchain (Yosys, Arachne-PNR, IceStorm). The J1(a) CPU is a small Forth-aimed CPU in Verilog, which leads yours truly into the weird and wonderful world of the Forth programming language.

Nullmodem hack using homebrew module:

nullmodem hack

Lame VGA image:

VGA screen

Fancy VGA adapter:

VGA adapter