Channel News #3: Announcing Mini Projects | Learning Electronics In The Lab With Jay Jay

This post is part of my video blog and you can find more information about this video on this show’s homepage which is here.

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Silly Job Title: Amp Alchemist

In this video I announce the new Mini Projects. These are a new feature of Silicon Chip magazine sponsored by Jaycar. Each month two or three Mini Projects get published in Silicon Chip, and we will be building those projects together on the channel each month!

If you’re interested in Silicon Chip magazine (it’s really good!) then I would certainly encourage you to subscribe.

In this video I misspoke and said this was the “May 2004” issue of the magazine, but of course it is the “May 2024” issue of the magazine! Unfortunately I missed that errata during editing and didn’t include a title clip correction.

I don’t understand what happened that caused that video corruption we saw earlier in the video. I suspect the workstation I was using to record the video had some other processing task which interfered with its recording speed or something? Hopefully this is not an ongoing problem. It’s not a problem I have seen before.

Update: ElectroneX has now been and gone and my write up about the day is over here: My day at ElectroneX with my friend. I got my photo with Dave Jones!

Thanks very much for watching! And please remember to hit like and subscribe!


Following is a product I use picked at random from my collection which may appear in my videos. Clicking through on this to find and click on the green affiliate links before purchasing from eBay or AliExpress is a great way to support the channel at no cost to you. Thanks!

Kaisi Soldering Tools With Desoldering PumpThis is an image of the product.notes

Let’s go shopping!

Fixing compile_commands.json for VS Code and Linux kernel sources

I have my Linux kernel sources setup like this:

-------------------
Fri Jun 14 00:35:24 [bash:5.2.15 jobs:0 error:0 time:2449]
jj5@virtuoso:/home/jj5/repo/git/git.kernel.org/torvalds-linux
$ git remote show origin
* remote origin
  Fetch URL: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git
  Push  URL: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git
  HEAD branch: master
  Remote branch:
    master tracked
  Local branch configured for 'git pull':
    master merges with remote master
  Local ref configured for 'git push':
    master pushes to master (local out of date)
-------------------

The scripts/clang-tools/gen_compile_commands.py runs just fine:

-------------------
Fri Jun 14 00:35:28 [bash:5.2.15 jobs:0 error:0 time:2453]
jj5@virtuoso:/home/jj5/repo/git/git.kernel.org/torvalds-linux
$ scripts/clang-tools/gen_compile_commands.py 
-------------------

But there is a problem with some unknown clang options, as you can see here:

Problems with clang commands in VS Code

So I wrote this collection of sed scripts to delete the problematic options:

-------------------
Fri Jun 14 00:11:28 [bash:5.2.15 jobs:0 error:0 time:1013]
jj5@virtuoso:/home/jj5/repo/git/git.kernel.org/torvalds-linux
$ cat jj5/fix-commands.sh 
#!/bin/bash

main() {

  set -euo pipefail;

  cd "$( dirname "$0" )";

  cd ..;

  local file="compile_commands.json";

  sed -i 's/-mpreferred-stack-boundary=3//g' "$file"
  sed -i 's/-mfunction-return=thunk-extern//g' "$file"
  sed -i 's/-mindirect-branch=thunk-extern//g' "$file"
  sed -i 's/-mindirect-branch-register//g' "$file"
  sed -i 's/-fno-allow-store-data-races//g' "$file"
  sed -i 's/-fconserve-stack//g' "$file"
  sed -i 's/-mrecord-mcount//g' "$file"

}

main "$@";
-------------------

Bug fixed! Thanks to my mates on IRC for helping me fix this one. This clangd extension for VS Code seems to work really well.

p.s. another possible solution is here.