• 1 Post
  • 15 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: July 3rd, 2023
  • funnystuff97@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world•I knew it all along!
    2·
    11 months ago

    FPGAs are where it’s at, and the job market is surprisingly pretty open right now. Everybody’s sleeping on them, everyone wants study CUDA cores or architecture or… ML hardware accelerators or whatever. If you can transition to RTL design or even silicon engineering, it’s a good industry to be in.

    Now, me personally, I’ve never made the funny magic smoke come out from one of my FPGAs, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve fucked up an entire pipeline because I thought a series of logic would take 3 cycles but really it took 2 and now my entire data path is wrong and somehow I missed it in simulation and now I’ve gotta rearchitect everything and running synthesis/P&R takes a goddamn century to run and this is like my 5th time programming my board and…

  • funnystuff97@lemmy.worldtoPrivacy@lemmy.ml•Why does this community, which is privacy oriented, use Discord rather than Matrix?
    0·
    1 year ago

    I think it falls into the same pitfalls as most super niche communities, like a lot of subreddits did.

    For example, the shaving subreddit (/r/wicked_edge I think?). Its mission statement was to introduce people to cleaner, safer, and more efficient shaving methods. And for the most part, with all of its resources and wikis, it successfully did it. But if you choose to stay after you’ve made your informed purchases, the posts were mostly braggarts showing off their latest hundreds-of-dollars handles, supreme razor blades, brushes made from actual gold, that sort of thing. My point is, the average person (by my guess, like 90% of people going to the site) gets the information they need and then never participate in the community again. But those who stay are those who really want to stay– people who are most likely to brag and boast. So over time, it falls more and more into plain old dick measuring contests.

    This obviously isn’t true of all communities, but I think it’s a common pitfall for a lot of them. I can imagine privacy is very similar: take all the steps you can to learn to protect your privacy, and then… you’re good, for the most part.

  • funnystuff97@lemmy.worldtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•What obscure thing you enjoy do you never get to talk about?
    0·
    1 year ago

    The “print hello world” equivalent of FPGAs is to make an LED blink. That teaches you how to use an FPGA’s clock, divide it down to a frequency the human eye can actually see, and route it out to a pin (the LED on your board). Then you can experiment with your catalog of digital circuit building blocks using buttons, switches, LEDs, and 7-segment displays. You can make your own custom logic of ANDs and ORs to display different logic.

    Some super beginner projects I found fun back in college:

    • Create a counter, and increment the counter every time you press a button. That’s the easy part. Then display the value on a 4-digit 7-segment display. It’s harder than it sounds, because you have to learn about time multiplexing! (At any one instance in time, only one digit is on, and the other three are off. Human persistence of vision makes us believe all 4 digits are being shown at once, but in reality, the system cycles through each digit, flashing one on for a few milliseconds, then turning it off and moving to the next one. Implementing this takes effort!)

    • Learning Finite State Machines and then implementing your own is fun. I made a “vending machine” state machine once, where different buttons corresponded to inserting different coins, and then once a certain amount of money was put in, you could select which beverage you wanted, the machine would “vend” (an LED would flash), and then change is administered. Another fun and classic FSM is the pattern detector, where you input a series of 1s and 0s, and the machine will blink an LED if it detects a certain pattern in the sequence, say, 11010. This one is a lot harder than it sounds, because it requires a lot of thinking of the different edge cases! If I input 111, for example, the system shouldn’t be like, “well he inputted 111 but I was expecting 110…, so I’m gonna start over”, because I could input “111111010” and the pattern is there, just at the end. This one teaches you how to draw state diagrams and Mealy/Moore machines!

    • Then you can get into using peripherals, like RGB LEDs, gyroscopes, graphics on a screen, ethernet connections, etc. You just need to learn the protocols and follow the correct logic in your own logic. It’s a lot of copy and pasting at first, but if you put in the effort to understand what you’re copying, you’ll pick up on it fast.

    Really, the world’s your oyster, all you need is a development kit and a program that will synthesize/place&route your Verilog or VHDL.

    And if you’d like to start at the very, very beginning, HDLBits is an amazing resource to learn Verilog: https://hdlbits.01xz.net/wiki/Main_Page

    Let me know if I can ever be of any assistance :)

  • funnystuff97@lemmy.worldtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•What obscure thing you enjoy do you never get to talk about?
    0·
    1 year ago

    FPGAs, love the damn things. They’re circuits that you can re-program at will after they’ve been manufactured! If you build, like, a 2-input AND gate, that’s all it will ever be. It can only take in 2 inputs and AND them together. But with an FPGA, they’re manufactured to be versatile; you “program” the circuit you want to achieve onto the chip, and it will achieve that functionality! You can make a 2-input AND gate, slap it onto a bread board, and have yourself that nifty little AND gate, but if you later decide you wanted it to be a NAND gate, just reprogram the chip and like magic, what was once an AND gate is now a NAND gate. They’re great!