At our office, we use the Acer RC111 as a Network Attached Storage device. It has been running a Debian installation all this while but we felt the need to upgrade it to a proper NAS OS instead. Comparing between NAS4Free or FreeNAS, we went with the former as it had more modest system requirements. The trouble with using the RC111 is that it does not come with any other boot device besides the main storage drives. Ideally, we would Read more
I was invited to speak at the Exceptional Hard and Soft Meeting 2012, a conference filled with people at the frontier of engineering and technology.
Dream big they say! Dare to step out of your comfort zone. These are what I have been repeating to myself weeks before entering Aeste for my 3 months internship. From the moment I had my phone interview, I have the feeling that my coming “journey” is not going to be an easy one but I guess nothing come easy though if we really wanted to archive something in return . And so, I bringing almost 0 knowledge in engineering Read more
This week I finished up the Rx portion of the UART device that follows the RS232 protocol. I was able to implement it onto the Spartan3 board. When I first tested it, I was a little confused because I didnt know that the letters were represented in ASCII code. My colleague Radek explained it to me. I am going to work on the Tx portion of the UART. I think that for the Tx part, I am going to design Read more
Another week has passed (fifth) and my work on SHA1 is coming to an end. I’m right now before the testing phase which would be hopefully done by the end of the day. Summing up all my struggles with SHA1 I have to say it was more difficult than I assumed it to be initially. Of course algorithm itself is really easy (after all it’s just a few summations and XOR operations) but the thing that makes it non-trivial is Read more
As I mentioned in my previous post, my task for this week is to study the remoteproc framework. The goal is to discover how it works because later, I’ll be implementing about the same thing. Because of the limited resource and information on this specific framework, I had to start my research using the linux kernel (3.9.6) source code. I had to go through several C files in order to understand the said framework: remoteproc.h, remoteproc_core.c, remoteproc_elf_loader.c. Most of them contain Read more
I’m designing an HDMI transmitter. I often refer to XIlinx’s designs of the HDMI for demonstration on Spartan3 and Spartan6. The application notes for these two designs are very helpful especially the Spartan3 design. Moreover the coding itself is easy to understand. Here is the two application notes : for spartan 3 XAPP460 and for Spartan6 XAPP495 and here is the design files XAPP460 and XAPP495. You need to register with Xilinx’s website to be able to download the design Read more
The task at hand this week is to design an HDMI transmitter. I gotta admit it this is the most interesting project yet. HDMI is this cable that you connect between your computer and HD Display and magically high quality audio and video appears on that display. Of course it’s not only the cable but the whole system that takes audio and video data from your output device and delivers it to your display on time and without the need Read more
The last week wasn’t that productive, although I still learned a lot, mainly theory, about different hashing techniques. Did you know what are “nothing up my sleeve numbers” or Chaitin-Kolmogorov random numbers? Anyway, after looking more closely at the MD5 algorithm and consultation with my boss, we decided in the middle of the week that I should rather focus on SHA1 algorithm for now. The reason is simple, the later seems to be more implementation friendly and require less memory Read more
