Engineering Elegance

Git SVN Workflow

For some of our projects, FreeRTOS specifically, we need to track a SVN upstream repository that is hosted on Source Forge. As we’re only interested in pulling upstream changes and not pushing anything upstream, this simplifies our workflow a bit. The first thing that is needed is to configure the upstream SVN repository. In our case, we already have an existing git repository. Therefore, instead of cloning the actual SVN tree, we’ll only pull in the necessary changes. $ cd Read more

By Shawn, ago

Git Upstream Ports

We’ve recently added a number of git repositories at github to track ports of various software tools to our platform. These are the steps that we used to get things working. We will use the binutils port as an example. Create For consistency, we’ll name all our upstream code as upstream for obvious reasons. Instead of tracking everything, it might be more beneficial to just track the upstream master branch as we only want to track the main development code. Read more

By Shawn, ago

The Littlest Processor

I’ve always dubbed the AEMB as the littlest processor that could, after the famous book with an engine. To figure out just how little it is? It occupies less than 20% of the real-estate in the second smallest Spartan6LX9 FPGA. Slice Logic Utilization: Number of Slice Registers: 866 out of 11440 7% Number of Slice LUTs: 1167 out of 5720 20% Number used as Logic: 1035 out of 5720 18% Number used as Memory: 132 out of 1440 9% Number Read more

By Shawn, ago

FPGA families overview

Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is a type of hardware/logic programmable integrated circuit. It’s flexibility, speed and the increasing number of IP cores make it into a popular solution in embedded system. The selection of the FPGA core is important when designing a FPGA system. FPGA vendors divide their products into few groups. Each group targets different application such as high performance, mid-range, low cost and low power application. Furthermore, each product group can divide into few families. Every family Read more

By chewchiruey, ago

Happy Year of the Dragon

Another new year and another holiday. We would like to take this opportunity to wish everyone happy holidays. May the year of the dragon bring happiness and prosperity to all! 恭喜發財 PS: Our offices are closed for the whole of next week (23-27 Jan 2012).

By Shawn, ago

Unattended Upgrades

We are managing a number of Debian servers in the office, for various internal applications. Initially, it was a simple matter of upgrading the servers manually. However, as the number of servers grew, the amount of repetitive apt-get upgrade commands that need to be entered became tedious. Unattended-upgrades to the rescue! Fortunately for Debian Squeeze, it is already packaged in the repository and installation is a simple matter of: # apt-get install unattended-upgrades However, what most guides do not tell Read more

By Shawn, ago

FIRST LEGO League 2012

As in previous years, I participated in the Malaysia Open Championship of FLL as a judge. This year, I was promoted to head judge for the project judging and had to manage 8 judges judging 48 teams for the competition. As I have done several rounds of judging before, I was looking forward to enjoying the show this year. The presentation judging proceeded without a hitch. All the teams proceeded with their presentations on time and the judges were fully Read more

By Shawn, ago

Taylor’s Engineering Fair 2011

I was invited to be a guest judge for the Engineering Fair 2011 at Taylor’s University today. The fair is a showcase for the first year and third year projects of the various engineering students at Taylor’s. After finishing with the judging work, I went around to have a look at the projects personally. It was a smart thing for them to coincide the Engineering Fair with the Open Day this weekend. As a result, parents and students who are Read more

By Shawn, ago

LwIP on AVR32

Since the basic function for HAL is able to run without serious problem. I have to put HAL on hold and start to do net layer for AVR32. However, I will come back to HAL when bugs ‘fly’ out or when the time I want to increase the performance of HAL. The net layer for the AVR32 is based on LwIP (Light Weight Internet Protocol). The LwIP is a open-source networking library and API. It can support the basic networking Read more

By chewchiruey, ago