<sorear>
for SBCs, wifi, 120V, and a few GB of storage are musts; unclear if I need to acquire a keyboard and monitor; actually all of the things I want to do I could do with a vps hmm
<awygle>
oh interesting. yeah a vps might be a good idea. another option could be an intel NUC, i have one and they're nice small easy little computers
<felix_>
hm, ok. maybe a third of the qfn footprints in the kicad libary i looked at didn't have a segmented center pad. didn't look at that many footprints though
<awygle>
there's a beaglebone with wifi as well, i think it's the blue or the green?
<awygle>
felix_: yeah that's fair. the "old" footprints and symbols still hang around a bit, but there's an active effort to clean things up and fix a lot of issues.
<felix_>
for a few footprints i have cleanup patches, but for the qfns in my last few designs i just always used my qfn footprint generator
<sorear>
for fpga stuff… most of what I want to do is "try to implement various ideas I've had, and also contribute to the open tools"… a lot of which is just algorithms, but memory and i/o could be useful??
<awygle>
sorear: one of the nice things about dev boards like the versa or the Arty A7 is that they have a ton of stuff on them which means if you want to do an open-source DDR3 controller or something, the peripheral is available.
<sorear>
yeah
<awygle>
those two would be high on my list
<TD-Linux>
zkms, I ran vivado on a (64-bit) atom with 8GB of RAM
<TD-Linux>
but don't do that
<awygle>
lol
<cr1901_modern>
sorear: Tinkerboard is my preferred SBC; more powerful than even Pi 3+. It can run yosys just fine; you could attach a icezero Pi hat and you have yourself an ARM-based FPGA dev board
<cr1901_modern>
(that's not Zynq)
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<sorear>
looks like this is 32-bit, while the pi3 is 64-bit?
<sorear>
i guess most boards even today don't have >3gb
<cr1901_modern>
I don't know of any. There's also Pine64, but I've heard of board issues w/ that
<cr1901_modern>
I'm very happy w/ my Tinkerboard, 64-bit isn't something I really miss on it
<prpplague>
sorear: well, it's just a matter of the address space, for most arm 32-bit devices the practical limit is at 2gb
<prpplague>
sorear: once you jump to 64-bit the range opens up
<prpplague>
sorear: a lot of companies about 5 years ago were tinkering with smaller dev boards with 2 to 8gb of ram, but that niche market didn't really pan out
<awygle>
Theres that ultra zed board, is that still hilarious cheap?
<prpplague>
sorear: so what you have now days is most arm boards have 2gb, where the higher end arm server soc's simply use DDR memory same as your "PC"
<sorear>
what do the boards use if it's not DDR
<cr1901_modern>
$535 is not what I'd call cheap
<prpplague>
sorear: sorry let me rephrase, i didn't specify clearly
<awygle>
It's still ddr (or sdr I guess) but not dimms
<prpplague>
sorear: so what you have now days is most arm boards have 2gb soldered directly to the board, where the higher end arm server soc's simply use DDR dimm memory sockets same as your "PC"
<prpplague>
sorear: and most of the boards with soldered down ram are LPDDR
<prpplague>
sorear: since lineage of most of the chips is from the cell phone industry
<awygle>
eh idk about most. but it's pretty common
<sorear>
prpplague: does the soc actually care whether the trace to the memory is planar or turns out of plane onto a DIMM?
<awygle>
No
<prpplague>
sorear: no
<sorear>
i assumed that was a PCB/DFM issue only
<sorear>
with the devboards not providing sockets because they add a lot to pcb cost
<prpplague>
sorear: it's mainly just cost, but a large number of the chips also use POP , or Package On Package
<prpplague>
so you generally don't see available memory in PoP form bigger than 2gb
<prpplague>
4gb get's pricey
<sorear>
i asked some berkeley/sifive people years ago why the the Xilinx boards they were using for testing all had 2gb of soldered-on memory instead of sockets, given that they were paying well over $1k for the FPGA *surely* the cost of a DIMM connector was negligible
<sorear>
never got a good answer
<prpplague>
sorear: hehe, well, memory training is a pain in the ass, so if they do soldered down, they only have to figure out how to train one set of memory
<prpplague>
sorear: it's a big deal from a support perspective
<prpplague>
sorear: technically it's possible to do a lot of different things with regards to memory, but everything is commodity and cost driven, both from a support and logistics perspective
<TD-Linux>
there are a couple arm boards with socketed memory. like softiron overdrive
<prpplague>
awygle: what kind of ram are you looking for?
<awygle>
prpplague: ddr4
* prpplague
opens up his ram box
<prpplague>
awygle: speed?
<prpplague>
awygle: ecc?
<prpplague>
awygle: size?
<awygle>
up to 3200, no ecc (not supported :()
<awygle>
ideally 16GB modules
<awygle>
rqou: i'm watching a video of a woman giving her cats silver vine and they are the most gorgeous ragdolls T_T so cute
<rqou>
lol
<rqou>
i should get a cat
<prpplague>
awygle: only have 4 and 8 at no ecc
<prpplague>
awygle: 16 and 32 with ecc
<awygle>
zkms: those are super cool! UWB antennas are great
<prpplague>
awygle: bummer
<awygle>
prpplague: hang on, lemme confirm whether ecc is supported
<awygle>
i'd rather have it if it is
<prpplague>
awygle: i have 4 sticks of 2133 32gb ecc that'd i'd do a good deal on
<sorear>
pie_: IBM eDRAM caches, probably. Every other vendor uses SRAM even for the L3 which has different analog issues
<awygle>
prpplague: yeah it's not supported, bummer
<pie_>
sorear, aha.
<prpplague>
awygle: doh
<awygle>
thanks for the offer tho
<prpplague>
awygle: i'll dig around and see if i have any other stuff hanging around
<prpplague>
(tomorrow
<sorear>
also most CPU caches these days are ECC because you save net energy by running them *below* the minimum voltage where they reliably store data
<prpplague>
hehe
<rqou>
O_o is _that_ why?
<sorear>
even if ECC isn’t supported for main memory, it’s probably mandatory for the cache
<cr1901_modern>
Wouldn't be the first time I've heard of "more transistors == less power usage" in the long run
<zkms>
sorear: do you have a cite on that, i'm interested
<zkms>
re: the reason CPU cache is ECC
<sorear>
poke me in the morning, I should be asleep
<zkms>
r
<zkms>
roger
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<azonenberg_work>
awygle: I've mostly been using VNC actually
<azonenberg_work>
i have one box hosting a bunch of VMs and the other remotes into them
<azonenberg_work>
But i use ssh heavily too
<azonenberg_work>
Depends on the use case
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<whitequark>
awygle: so I looked at 3d printer hardware
<whitequark>
I feel incredibly good about my PCB design skills now
<awygle>
whitequark: lol I saw your tweets
<awygle>
Hey how good is the Glasgow self test? I know you were working on one
<whitequark>
awygle: `glasgow run selftest --help`
<awygle>
woo
<awygle>
I will be building at least one tomorrow. Ideally all of them but we'll see lol
<whitequark>
sweet
* awygle
zzz
<rqou>
herp derp, iterative graph manipulating algorithms are hard (not P&R related, yet another distraction)
<rqou>
cyclic graphs are also hard :P
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<qu1j0t3>
* | Miyu doesn't have a hoarding problem, she just has a lot of hobbies || that's what i tell myself
<Miyu>
:D
<sorear>
that's actually a decent one, esp §4
<sorear>
rqou: ^potentially also relevant
<Zorix>
me too.. hobbies heh
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<gruetzkopf>
i mostly store my stuff in euroboxes. the biggest one available is 800x1200mm (literally pallet sized)
<florolf>
gruetzkopf: can you recommend a supplier of transparent euroboxes? the auer ones are all opaque
<awygle>
euroboxes for your eurocards that go in your euroracks
<azonenberg_work>
... in the eurozone?
<awygle>
high way to the eurozone
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<sorear>
question that didn't get any takers last night: are there products I should NOT use if I want to be able to contribute to the open tools later?
<azonenberg_work>
sorear: the main thing to avoid is reversing any of the proprietary tools
<azonenberg_work>
merely using them shouldnt be a big deal but dont decompile them etc
<gruetzkopf>
i'm all about opaque ons, sorry
<gruetzkopf>
*ones
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<cpresser>
florolf: there are some sellers that have used euroboxes on ebay. I usually go for those.
<cpresser>
ah wait, didnt read the question properly. basically all of them are opaque.
<awygle>
hm. at what point is it worth going to a switcher instead of an ldo... i should really figure out how much power this thing is allowed to draw...
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<TD-Linux>
I don't really have a good storage solution for bare PCBs either, I currently use plastic totes with cardboard spacers inside
<TD-Linux>
awygle, given the really low idle power switchers you can get now, the switcher is nearly always going to be more efficient
<q3k>
gruetzkopf: where do you buy your euroboxes, and how much are they?
<q3k>
gruetzkopf: i'm thinking of upgrading from ikea samla ones, as they suck at stacking
<q3k>
gruetzkopf: although maybe i should just invest in proper shelving instead
<gruetzkopf>
mostly diffusion
<prpplague>
i mount all my pcbs on laser cut acrylic and have a generic book shelf which has adjustable pegs for shelves. each acrylic board slides in on the set of pegs
<prpplague>
i can get about 25 boards in at a time