This week I started work on the network connections from the chip, mainly the ETHERNET communication from MCU to network. I was fairly new to the subject but not completely as I have completed my Data Communication module already, hence was familiar to the OSI model and other network conventions. However I soon came to realize that I was actually at the tip of the iceberg and just had the general knowledge of network connectivity. I set out to research Read more
This week I worked on SPI (Series Peripheral Interface) communication from the PIC18F97J60 to 25LC256 series EEPROM which comes with the PICDEM.NET2 development board. It was a completely new area for me and I was reading up a lot about the basics of SPI communication supported by the PIC. I was able to find numerous examples available from the microchip website giving instructions on the aspects of coding for SPI communication. The biggest help for me in understanding and coding Read more
Fixed a major problem with the computers at the office today. We currently have our users authentication handled by LDAP and their home directories stored in an NFS server. This is a pretty typical tried and tested scenario in many places. Things were working fine for a while but for the past week or so, we started to experience mysterious problems. If only one person was logged in, everything was fine. But the moment another person logged into another machine, Read more
The second week of internship was not very productive. I still faced difficulties with the UART communication. In order to understand the flow of data better I tried to write the UART code in assembly language. I came to realize that there was more to coding than just writing lines. Understanding what happens is essential. Hopefully I’ll be able to solve the UART challenge and move on to SPI next week.
It was the first week of internship and I reported in for work on Monday 7th Jan. The first item on the agenda was an introduction to the work place, the expectations and the responsibilities of the job. Furthermore the work timings and other details were given out. My responsibilities had three parts to be completed in three months. Each of which are discussed below: SD-card: reading and writing to and from an SD card. Ethernet: transmitting and receiving from Read more
I guess that the world did not end. So, we’ve got a new year to look forward to! In which case, happy holidays, everyone! We’ll be back next year.
Our new carpets were installed yesterday. It took them all of half a day to rip up the old ones and install the new ones. The entire office is now brightly coloured and I hope that means that we’ll be able to work more productively come 2013! PS: There’s but one more thing to do – new furniture!
Although we’ve only been squatting at our current offices for the last few years, we did not renovate the office when we first moved in as the previous tenant had left an office which was mostly what we wanted anyway. However, with the wear and tear of the last couple of years, it is now time to do a little refurbishment. The month of December is great for such things as nobody is around in the office. So, we’ve ordered Read more
In preparation for the development of our new products in 2013, we have ordered a couple of FPGA based development boards to aid in our work. Both of these turned out to be Digilent boards – Atlys and Zedboard. The Atlys will serve as our general purpose development board as it has the necessary I/O devices that we will be integrating into our new product. The Zedboard is going to serve as an experimental platform for future products. Both of Read more
After spending several months running user home directories under GlusterFS, we have encountered some minor problems of files that get modified or unmodified in a seemingly random fashion. This might be due to us using Gluster in an unsupported way. Therefore, we decided to switch to a tried and true method – storing home user directories under NFS. In the intervening months, we had upgraded our entire office network to a gigabit network and purchased a new dedicated file-server. Therefore, Read more