projects by kiwih

This is harder than you'd think - This guide describes the steps involved to install Vitis / Vivado 2024.1 on Ubuntu Linux inside a Distrobox container.

Using ChatGPT to write Verilog and produce a chip for my christmas tree - TL;DR: I architectured a microcontroller chip in early 2023 using ChatGPT and it was taped out.

GPT-3, DALL-E, Codex, and more - It was long expected that among all the practices which scientists could apply computers to, that art would remain safe: after all, how can one program a machine to have creativity?

A primer to hardware security - Scan chains, a Design for Test (DFT) technique, are implemented in integrated circuits (ICs) in order to test their correct functionality.

Code injection and memory editing!

Because breadboarding is a pain and 2-layer PCBs are cheap - Recently I purchased some Raspberry Pi Pico modules.

This + MicroPython = an absolute joy - A few days ago the Raspberry Pi foundation made the surprise announcement that they’d had their own silicon produced in the form of a dual-core ARM Cortex M0+ microcontroller.

And a brief look at timer interrupts - Measuring, monitoring, and reacting to the passage of time in embedded systems is an ubiquitous requirement.

Let's have some fun with files - Embedded projects often call for some kind of data storage and retrieval.

Depicted in 2020 - For the first time ever, I have a 3d printer!

A simple change to add agency to an otherwise autonomous game - I just moved to the USA, and as a leaving gift, a work colleague gave a New Zealand themed version of the classic game Snakes and Ladders (the NZ theme being that this was Taniwha and Ladders,

Project initialisation, intro to debugging, and the virtual COM port - Getting started with an 32-bit ARM-based microcontroller is always a little daunting.

Enabling data transfer from 'scope to PC - Recently I acquired an older Agilent 54621A oscilloscope for my at-home workstation, and yes, that is a floppy drive on the front.

Reverse engineering a simple embedded system!

Can we emulate a PIC16F core using an FPGA?

Making an SSD1306 work under serious resource constraints - The goal here was to take a common (and cheap) SSD1306 LCD module and drive it using a PIC16F677A.

For use with FatFS!