Bitwise

Laser Soldering (Part 1)

Sun, 11 Mar 2018 23:23:55 +1300

I’ve been working on a little side project recently. My goal is to be able to use a laser beam to solder components to circuit boards, in an automated, repeatable fashion using a CNC machine.

On peripherals and abstractions

Sat, 02 Sep 2017 15:16:00 +1200

I’ve been working on a C++ embedded hardware abstraction layer as a side project for a little while and am trying to make use of as many zero-cost abstractions as possible. The ultimate goal is to have a low-level yet still easy-to-use HAL which lets me take full advantage of C++’s advanced type system and higher level abstractions.

How I made my first PCB, screwed up, and fixed it

Sat, 21 Jan 2017 19:12:07 +1300

A month ago or so I was asked by a relative to make a voltage regulator from 12VDC to 5VDC for charging a USB device like a smartphone from a motorcycle battery (this was the intended usage). Now I know you can find these commercially for a few dollars, but I thought it would be a good opportunity to learn how to design printed circuit boards.

Backplane interfaces for embedded devices?

Tue, 17 Jan 2017 23:50:28 +1300

I’ve long been interested in plug-and-play interfaces such as PCI or PCI Express, especially those with extensible backplanes, and have been looking into creating some edge-connector cards for my own embedded, low-cost/low-power projects, where complex, multi-layer protocols such as PCI are too complicated and unnecessary yet some flexibility is desired after assembly, without having a mess of wires everywhere.

A convenient circuit for testing I2C and SPI devices

Tue, 27 Sep 2016 23:08:41 +1300

Since I am currently working on integrating different devices into my bare metal kernel using the LPC1114’s hardware peripheral controllers, I figured I needed a reasonably convenient way to plug those devices onto a breadboard without spending too much time fiddling around with circuitry. This is what I came up with, feel free to use it as inspiration if you find it useful:

A curious case of suboptimal code generation

Sat, 17 Sep 2016 22:55:53 +1200

While writing the scheduler for my bare metal kernel I noticed that the timing of the task interrupt was slightly off from what it should have been, by a few clock cycles. Not a huge problem, but it got me curious to investigate where the slowdown was. The problem, as it turns out, was more intricate than I originally thought.

test

Sun, 11 Sep 2016 14:47:15 +1200

Reset status detection on LPC microcontrollers

Sun, 04 Sep 2016 22:50:59 +1200

In this first post I want to talk about reset status detection on the LPC line of microcontrollers by NXP, which I am currently experimenting with. They are nice little 32-bit chips, I recommend them if you like bare-metal development, although they do have Arduino-like SDKs if you prefer.

About

Sat, 03 Sep 2016 17:48:10 +1200

Welcome to my personal blog, where I talk mostly about software development (and embedded development in particular) as well as mathematics, physics, computer graphics, cryptography, and all the other scientific fields which interest me. This website is built offline using the Hugo static website generator software, with a somewhat modified (read: heavily hacked) version of the Slender theme. The small amount of Javascript that is present is used only to render math expressions via the MathJax renderer and to power the Disqus comments — there will never be ads, analytics or any kind of user tracking on here.