PCB

PCB

I have been working on refining my PCB skills. I came up with a board idea, did the schematic, laid out and routed the board, ordered the PCB and parts plus a stencil, stenciled the paste, placed the parts , reflowed the board, powered it up…. and it worked perfectly! The board is just something fun to play with.. it is a 4 processor arduino board with 4 ATMega328PBs in an SPI ring network ( since the 328PB has two SPIs).

I made a small video of the board process for those inclined to learn: https://youtu.be/V1xXG8YTmK4

House

House

.. and a few pictures post Hawaii. Most of the exterior walls on the third floor are now done. Interior walls next, then some shear wall work, then the deck, then the two story tall great room walls.

Nano

Nano

This is kind of a neat little development board. Raspberry Pi sized, quad-core ARM plus 128 NVidia Maxwell CUDA cores. 472 GFlops in a very small package, perfect for machine learning camera image recognition. I’m thinking about putting one of these with every camera in my new house so I can have continuous object recognition feeding into a central AI.

Processor

Processor

I have been noodling around the idea of doing my own processor for my supercomputer. I’d like to play around with some old school SIMD PE architectures, and those design works well within an FPGA implementation. Curious if any of my nerd/processor architecture friends would comment on a selective execution idea I am considering.

http://www.sponaugle.com/papers/SIMDPartitionIdea.pdf

A classical problem in SIMD machines is how to handle partial execution, where you want only some processors in the cluster to execute certain instructions. The method I am proposing is a combination of an old school vector mask combined with RISC style register/register instruction set.
http://www.sponaugle.com/papers/SIMDPartitionIdea.pdf

Facebook Post: 2019-03-14T17:56:58

Facebook Post: 2019-03-14T17:56:58

3rd Floor Joist are starting to materialize. Once those are finished the rear deck will get installed, which will make building of the great room 2 story walls much easier. It will be cool to see the third floor built.

CanPi

CanPi

For my fellow nerd friends – I wrote up a quick short note describing the operation of my CAN-PI datalogging hardware board. I would love to hear some comments/suggestions/criticisms/race conditions I didn’t think of/etc. It does contain a quick walk through of the critical parts of the interrupt handlers.

http://www.sponaugle.com/raspcan/RaspCanTheory.pdf

House

House

Interior walls go so much quicker. The floor joists for the 3rd floor were delivered today, so as soon as they get the deck joists installed they can start on the next floor.

I did an overlay merge with one of the picture and the floor plan, and it looks like they built what we designed.