spirilis

The FPGA expert on our team took care of the VHDL programming while I designed the electronics.
 
Our first version had a data rate of 640Mbps. The second version had a data rate of 1.2Gbps.
 
At those speeds, the custom protocol needed to be enhanced with an 8b10b encoder in the VHDL code. That would enhance data reception by preventing excessive consecutive zero bits. The receiver would see nothing with many zeros because the light is off during a zero bit.
 
It is my assumption that a 2Mbps data rate is slow enough that the 8b10b encoder would be overkill.
 
Oh, the SFP modules have a speed rating. Get the ones that are rated for OC-3 or 155Mbps. The next speed option is OC-12 or 640Mbps. Also, make sure the SFP electrical interface is LVDS and not PECL.
 
The key for getting my proposed interface working would be a software routine that would send a repetitive keep alive message on the optical link. The receivers need to stay in sync with each other. So just send a tick-tock message at a regular interval to keep the link up and the receivers synchronized.
 
Thanks for keeping this thread alive. I keep forgetting to act on this design. I can see this hardware design working well because it is simple. It now looks like a software challenge to me.

Definitely getting cheaper and full color

I am going through the edX/UT Austin RTOS class using the MSP432 and it's been fun. A great idea for the latter half of the Flash is to implement a simple filesystem.
 
The Cortex-M4F's big break relative to the MSP430 is probably the possibility for DSP work. Some day I want to do rapid sampling of something (accelerometer probably) and apply some DSP filters to condition the data on the MCU before reporting it. Having an onboard filesystem would allow you to store a good bit of aggregated data remotely and then dump it via USB UART later (perhaps build a command line interface thread for the RTOS which can manage the filesystem).

What orientation do you have for a project? The capabilities of the processors differ so much that it is difficult to answer your question without knowing where you are going. No sarcasm is intended in the following suggestions:
 
Robotics? You can do multiaxis control in real time.
 
Audio? You can do signal processing within the limits of the ADC resolution.
 
Video? I would guess that you could produce VGA output to run 640X480 VGA at 8 color (one bit per color), or possibly better with some careful programming, and have no major issue producing a videogame. Certainly 320X240 should be straightforward. Using R-2R chains, you could easily produce interesting video output, though anything requiring a frame buffer would likely be out due to RAM limitations. It would probably not be too hard to produce NTSC in the same vein as an Apple II.
 
The gains you get with the 432 include speed, memory, and processing per cycle. With a 430, serious audio isn't really practical. Real video is superstar territory. With the 432, both are straightforward, though not necessarily trivial.
 
Specific ideas in audio: A guitar multi effect, maybe distortion, Wah (a pot on an ADC for bandsweep), flange, and reverb. All are moderately straightforward, but explore different algorithms.
 
Video: One of the coolest thins I saw at a trade show in the late 70's was a video dazzler. Just cool patterns, but really, really cool. An audio input to control an arithmetically produced pattern as VGA output?
 
Robotics: An 8 channel, I2C command servo controller?
 
Do you ride? One of the things I did years ago with a PIC was an electronic ignition for a 1975 Honda CB400F (4 cylinder). Maxed out at about 12000RPM. The unit was tight to about 8000, but had a bit of jitter above that. Drove an output for the tach as well. The 432 can cover other things at the same time, and not lose it's place for the ignition timing.
 
Got a cat? Using the ADC and DSP capability, an ultimate class cat toy? Detect appropriate stimulus (Meow, scratching, othe r) using a microphone, and do something interesting, like turn on a laser pointer mounted on servo's to entertain the cat, and when it gets to a certain point, release a treat?
 
Ok... my mind runneth over. Several of these are things I don't have the time to do. There are many, many more. All of these take more than the 430 can reasonably do (except ignition timing), but none fully explore the capability of the 432.

I am going through the edX/UT Austin RTOS class using the MSP432 and it's been fun. A great idea for the latter half of the Flash is to implement a simple filesystem.
 
The Cortex-M4F's big break relative to the MSP430 is probably the possibility for DSP work. Some day I want to do rapid sampling of something (accelerometer probably) and apply some DSP filters to condition the data on the MCU before reporting it. Having an onboard filesystem would allow you to store a good bit of aggregated data remotely and then dump it via USB UART later (perhaps build a command line interface thread for the RTOS which can manage the filesystem).

just curious what's the sample rate for your logic analyzer?

Progress is slow in dAISy land, mostly due to lack of time. But I finally got time to unpack and test the first production batch of the 2-channel dAISy HAT for Raspberry Pi.

 
I've used MacroFab for the first time, which worked out great. Because they don't have NRE, it's the perfect solution for slowly ramping up volumes while still tweaking the design.
 
I even built a little jig for programming and testing.

 
Even though I included a Tag-connect footprint, I decided to use pogo pins and a F5529 LaunchPad for programming. As communication with the Raspberry Pi is only via UART, I can also fully test the board via the LaunchPad. Saves a ton of time compared to using a real RPi.
 
I will have to write some useful documentation before putting them up for sale on Tindie. I'm a little scared of the potential support nightmare to help non-IT people configure their RPis.
 
PM me if you can't wait and don't need no stinkin' documentation.
 
Edit: Now available on Tindie https://www.tindie.com/products/astuder/daisy-hat-ais-receiver-for-raspberry-pi/

We are the creators of the smallest embedded JavaScript engine - V7 (https://github.com/cesanta/v7). It allows to export existing C/C++ functionality into the JS environment and express device logic in the JS script - easily updatable, unlike monolithic firmware.

 

Here it is - with examples for CCS: https://github.com/cesanta/v7/tree/master/examples/TI/MSP432

 

We are looking for feeback and requests for ports to other devices.

CC1310 is available through the board manager in Energia 18 aka Energia 1.6.10E18. Got to Tools->Board->Board Manager and look for CC13xx.
There is also a library for the Radio called EasyLink. You can install that library through the library manager at Sketch->Include Library->Manage Libraries. Look for EasyLink.
 
The documentation is still a work in progress but some of the API's documentation can be found here: http://energia.nu/reference/easylink/
 
There are 2 examples Sketches included in the library. One for TX and one for RX. Make sure that you have the CC13xx board selected before you look for the examples under File->Examples->EasyLink.

I'll admit I haven't finished the training on TI-RTOS (next plan after I'm done with this course) - but the concepts introduced in the course are clarifying some of the settings I was seeing with TI-RTOS (Like WTF is StackSize used for).  So I can see this helping my understanding of using another RTOS.

One of the cooler things about the course is the casual introduction to various use-cases, section 4.1 particularly.
 
4.1.4, "Real-Time Control Systems" had one of the best descriptions of PID control that I've seen as it involved both practical descriptions and math--including casual mention of such scary terms as "Lorenz transforms" (which I still don't understand) but no requirement that you truly grok them, as the page included very practical advice on what the P/I/D segments do.
 
The 4.1 subsections prior talk about DSP and introduce the MACQ, or Multiple Access Circular Queue, along with tacitly demonstrating an optimization (where you allocate 2X the memory required and maintain 2 copies so that 1 copy can always be walked by simple address incrementing without having to check the circular buffer address boundary).  Having noticed that many DSP oriented chips include hardware support for "circular buffers" (where the address can increment or decrement ad infinitum and the hardware does the modulo/bounds checking for you), I understand now why they're such a big deal.
 
Cool stuff.

I just started it yesterday too. I'm kinda late to the party so I figured I'd try to catch-up as much as possible. I've done all of chapter 1 and lab 1 yesterday and watched all of chapter 2 today. I'll do lab 2 tomorrow.
 
There was a LOT of material in chapter 2! None of it is super complicated but there's still a lot of it. It's great to see and understand how an RTOS works though! 
 
I'll certainly go for the verified certificate like for the previous course!

Yeah in your scenario I think using I2C for this purpose is fine.  Probably makes sense to have a GPIO on the F2013 signal to the F5529 that it has SD16_A data to report (as a matter of flow-control).

I2C is pretty awkward to implement (performs well enough but, you're managing a hardware state machine).  Pretty much requires an ISR, although @@Rei Vilo did write a software master-only I2C library that's included in Energia these days.

I2C is pretty awkward to implement (performs well enough but, you're managing a hardware state machine).  Pretty much requires an ISR, although @@Rei Vilo did write a software master-only I2C library that's included in Energia these days.

I'm doing Lab #2 right now, which is where you write your first RTOS scheduler and make the whole time-slicing scheduled thread concept work for the first time... and I just want to add, this is a ton of fun!!!
 
Class is taking more time to go through than I thought it would, mostly the lectures, but I'm making time for it here and there.  There are 6 sections to the class and only 1-5 are up right now, #6 I think is the actual communication with the CC2650 Bluetooth Low Energy coprocessor (where you use either the TI CC2650 BoosterPack or the CC2650 LaunchPad in boosterpack mode).  The bulk of the code being run here is already written by the professors in the "BSP" library, e.g. for communicating with the LCD and drawing lines/text, reading the temperature sensor, accelerometer, etc.  Your job is just to learn the specific core facilities that an RTOS provides.
 
The "magic" of an RTOS and simulating multiple threads on a single CPU wasn't as complicated as I thought, and while the particulars of this course only teach ARM's specific way of context switching I generally understand the analysis required to implement this on another chip:
 
1. Understand exactly which registers get pushed onto the stack when an interrupt occurs and in which order
2. Push the remaining registers
3. Know exactly how to exit an ISR correctly - the actual context "switch" relies on this

I had a somewhat lousy experience with Arrow during the RPi3 promo; while I ended up getting all my goods (although the Pi T-Cobbler adapter I bought evidently was the wrong kind, which wasn't obvious on their site at the time), they shipped it in 4 separate shipments that appeared to come from the same location, thus inflating the shipping costs.  I went along with it anyhow (as the total shipping cost at $16 was still less than a Pi3) thinking they just source from lots of locations but that was not the case.
 
For kicks, I decided to try the free shipping today (since it's the last day for it).  Got 50 of the Fox FX135A-327 (used with my CC1310 boards, seems like a nice & super compact XTAL).
 
I used paypal for payment, and Paypal sent me their confirmation email that I was charged, but the Arrow website never produced an Order confirmation page (had a progress bar animation going for 10 minutes before I closed the tab) and I see no evidence of my order in the "Order history" page.
 
I do have a marketing contact from Arrow who followed up with me on my previous order so I sent her the details and asked her to look into it.  Thankfully Paypal includes the vendor's Invoice ID so she will have a reference# to look up.
I recall back in August when I ordered a bunch of parts, I could never see the invoice or manifest on their website; when I tried the online chat support to ask why this was so, they seemed to dismiss it rather quickly as a "known issue".  Sounds like a bunch of amateurs running the site's backend who don't have their s**t together IMO.

Looks like the XMS rev C is a minor pre-production release, whose differences from production are:
 
http://www.ti.com/lit/an/slaz691a/slaz691a.pdf

PS- No examples yet, give me a few more days and I'll provide something--along with verify CC3100 compatibility (so it's an alternative NV mem option for Tiva and MSP430 too)

I heard some rumors about new parts coming, and some new features which were a surprise to me. Definitely not something I can prove easily, but it ties back to something I wanted a while ago. I hope we hear something more solid soon. 

The previous FR5968 swapout was for "early adopters". Not sure how many that covered.

I get a 
"Your account does not have access to samples. Please remove the highlighted devices, or, purchase these parts in order to checkout. To learn more click here."
 
Also, following the link:
TI provides sample ICs to design engineers to support new product designs. Due to the high cost of a sample program like TI's, we require complete contact information using a corporate (.com) email domain as well as full shipping information. To order samples, please login to myTI and click on the Login & password link to update your myTI Profile to a corporate issued email address.

Heh .. you can always tell when someone gets a new hot air tool

I think it would be nice if TI could provide free MSP432P401R production silicon samples for folks who bought a black LaunchPad and want to try replacing the chip.  Not everyone's got the tools but many of us probably do...

I'm not sure if this quite counts as "mailbag" as it's a bit big, but this was delivered recently. A nice new workshop for the end of the garden that I'm currently busy kitting out with workbenches, power, ethernet, etc. It obviously also required the purchase of some more power tools to do the job.