Recent content on iank.org
iank.org https://iank.org/posts/frogsboro-embedded-linux-board-sam9x60-sip/ - Another custom embedded Linux board. I recently did a free evaluation of Altium Designer and built this as a way to try it out. The design is based on the SAM9X60 SiP and has a USB device port, two USB host ports, a microSD card, and a low profile 40-pin expansion connector (following the Raspberry Pi pinout) which…
iank.org https://iank.org/posts/catfood-custom-imx6ull-board/ - As a vehicle for learning OrCAD, I built a custom embedded Linux board using NXP’s i.MX6ULL processor. The board is called CATFOOD (I was more excited to get started than I was to come up with a name). It has the i.MX6, DDR3, NAND flash, an Ethernet PHY, and an SD card. It presents a serial console over the USB-C connector,…
iank.org https://iank.org/posts/cyclone-iv-julia-set-explorer/ - A custom Cyclone IV board interfaces with TFT LCD panel, capacitive touch controller, SDR SDRAM. The FPGA superimposes a Julia set on the Mandelbrot set. Touching the screen chooses the set point z0. Check out Malin Christersson’s julia set visualizations here . This is basically an implementation of the first demo on that…
iank.org https://iank.org/posts/using-radare2-to-make-a-simple-binary-patch/ - My partner found a game on her computer that she probably downloaded a decade ago, and we wanted to tweak the behaviour. In case it’s not clear, the following is outrageous and the right way to do this would have been to edit the freely-available C++ source code and rebuild the game, either on my partner’s…
iank.org https://iank.org/posts/mul-t-lock-interactive-picked/ - The other day I picked a Mul-T-Lock Interactive key-in-knob cylinder that a locksmith gave me from his scrap bucket. That feels like an accomplishment to me, hence this otherwise empty post. This morning I repeated the process on video, which took about half an hour. I have one thought to contribute: the interactive element…
iank.org https://iank.org/posts/i-pressed-caps-lock-once-in-1989/ - It’s a widely reported phenomenon that the most popular or well-received thing a person creates is rarely the thing they are most proud of. Sometimes they grow to resent its overshadowing their more challenging or interesting output. Radiohead reportedly hates Creep . Ursula Vernon is a Hugo award-winning writer and…
iank.org https://iank.org/posts/your-food-is-always-outside-of-you/ - Yesterday I gave a talk at the NCSU Linux Users’ Group and I’ve posted the slides and a video here. Not captured in the audio was, after the talk, an impromptu lecture about Hilbert’s infinite hotel and then Jim Witschey came up to talk about the expectation of the Poisson distribution. So it was a good time!…
iank.org https://iank.org/posts/a-true-random-number-generator/ - This page describes the implementation of (Yet Another) avalanche noise hardware random number generator. This is a device which has been implemented many times [e.g. Rob Seward , Aaron Logue ], including some commercial offerings [e.g. Entropy Key , TrueRNG ]. This project does not do anything better than existing work, but I…