The X86 has always supported unaligned accesses. In the ARM world the first architecture that supported unaligned accesses in hardware was ARMv6. The architecture was implemented in the ARM11 core around the year 2002 and onward. There is an excellent… Continue Reading
This is Part 2 of a two-part series on Ethernet RMII. In Part 1 I described my hardware setup and basic Ethernet operation. In the second and final part I will describe the design of specialized MAC cores I implemented… Continue Reading
This is Part 1 of the two-part series on Ethernet RMII. Part 2 is also available. Imagine your application requires a non-standard periphery controlled by an embedded processor. What options do you have? The periphery can be implemented in an… Continue Reading
How to export PCB design from the free Altium Circuit Maker v1.0.4 so that it can be submitted to OSH Park fab. This took me an evening to figure out; OSH Park service was bitching about missing “outline” and/or drill… Continue Reading
[half-way through; click a pic to see hi-res] [connections to bga] [finished “product”] And it (almost) worked! Though not at-speed, because of wire inductances.
During pre-Christmas sale on Seeed Studio Bazaar they offered these digital radio modules with the nRF24L01+ chip for only US$0.81 each. So I bought 10 of them outright 🙂 What would YOU suggest to do with them? Build a wireless… Continue Reading
This issue bugged me a long time, finally I solved it this evening. Debugging code on my PIP-Watch using my ST-LINK-v2 JTAG debugger was very painful because the debugger software — OpenOCD and GDB — kept failing randomly during debug… Continue Reading
In previous post we discussed CPU power consumption in PIP-Watch. Today we look into Bluetooth power consumption because it is significant as much as the CPU power.
Processor Power The PIP-Watch is a battery-powered device that will be continuously on, hence the average power consumption is one of the most important engineering aspects. In this post I will go through two simple steps of optimizing CPU power… Continue Reading