Routing Differential Signals

Differential Signalling uses a pair of complementary signals to cary data, that is each wire is carrying the opposite signal, those signals are subtracted at the receiving end and the result is either 0 for noise or 1 for a valid signal. This technique is used with high speed signals to reduce crosstalk and EMI, examples of differential signalling include the twisted pairs inside Ethernet cables, HDMI and USB. When routing...

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STM32F4 Discovery Quick Start Guide

I finally got my hands on an STM32F4 Discovery board, those are super cheap STM32F407 ARM Cortex-M4 boards from ST. The Cortex-M4 is perfect for DSP applications as it has SIMD and an FPU and it also runs at 168Mhz. As for the board, it seems okay given its price, I really hate the headers though and it only has a few components namely, an audio DAC, a chip microphone, an accelerometer and a few LEDs. There's also an...

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Portable SDR with Olinuxino for Tracking Wildlife

I was working on a project for a biologist friend of mine, that involved tracking RF tag implants on wildlife, using an SDR DVB-T dongle. He wanted a portable solution to be placed near the sprainting places of Otters(Lutra lutra), the main subject of the study, where they regularly come to deposit scent marks. An RF tag is implanted on the animal which sends pulses on a frequency unique for each tag, this way we're able...

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MIPS1 ISA Implementation with Verilog

uMIPS is a 32­-bit pipelined processor implementing the MIPS1 ISA, written in synthesizable Verilog and tested on a DE0 CycloneIII FPGA board. A great deal of the ISA is implemented, enough to run small C programs compiled with the gcc toolchain. The design is based on a classic five-stage pipeline, fetch, decode, execute, memory and write-back stages, each one is represented by an architectural state register, it's worth...

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nRFCam

The nRFCam is an open-source 2.4GHz wireless camera built using the TCM8230MD camera, an ARM Cortex-m3 LPC176x MCU and a Nordic nRF24l01p chip for the radio link. Overview On reset, the Nordic chip is initialized and a PWM channel is configured to generate the clock signal for the EXTCLK, fast GPIO is used for the data bus and the other sync signals. Once the camera is configured, using the I2C interface, it starts sending...

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