I bolted an old PC case fan to my microphone stand to act as an air extractor over my soldering station.
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Category Archives: Hardware
The 1969 Apollo Guidance Computer
Here’s a great talk about the Apollo Guidance Computer: Light Years Ahead | The 1969 Apollo Guidance Computer.
Decadence
When I was a kid I had a clumsy analog multimeter, and I would have been awed to have something like this. Now you can buy them for $5, so I got a whole bunch of them…
iThings
In my lab I have an iPod touch (7th gen), an iPhone 6s (w/ SIM), an iPhone 6s (w/o SIM), and an iPhone 4s (w/o SIM). And two MacBook Pros. And I don’t even consider myself an Apple fanboi.
IDC ribbon cables
ChatGPT tells me about Insulation-Displacement Connector cables, such as these.
RTL
The initialism “RTL” can stand for both “Register Transfer Level” and “Resistor-Transistor Logic” as explained by ChatGPT.
Critical Path != Critical Section
I always get the concepts “critical path” and “critical section” confused.
The “critical section” is the part in your algorithm which you must hold a lock for; whereas the “critical path” is an idea from hardware design which relates to the time taken for the longest combinatorial logic that needs to be processed during a clock cycle, thus limiting the frequency you can run your clock at.
Although the terminology “critical path” came from hardware, the same terminology is used in software. ChatGPT has a fairly good write-up on the two uses of the term “critical path”.
I learned a little more about this in Introduction to VHDL for FPGA and ASIC design.
CRC
I watched Ben Eater’s videos How do CRCs work? and Checksums and Hamming distance (the full course is Learn about error detection) then found the Wikipedia page: Cyclic redundancy check.
Also of interest:
BPS BB830
These BB830 breadboards are the ones Ben Eater uses in his videos.
HP-16C
I was watching Ben Eater’s video Build an 8-bit decimal display for our 8-bit computer and I was interested in what calculator he was using. Seems to be an HP-16C.