Name that Ware January 2017 The Ware for January 2017 is shown below: This close-up view shows about a third of the circuit board. If it turns out to be too difficult to guess from the clues shown here, I’ll update this post with a full-board photo; but I have a feeling long-time players of Name that Ware might have too easy a time with this one. Posted in name that ware | Winner, Name that Ware December 2016 The ware for December 2016 is a diaper making machine. The same machine can be configured for making sanitary napkins or diapers by swapping out the die cut rollers and base material; in fact, the line next to the one pictured was producing sanitary napkins at the time this photo was taken. Congrats to Stuart for the first correct guess, email me for your prize! Name that Ware December 2016 The Ware for December 2016 is below. Wishing everyone a safe and happy holiday season! Winner, Name that Ware November 2016 The Ware for November 2016 is a Link Instruments MSO-28 USB scope.
Congrats to Antoine for the first guess which got the model number correct, email me for your prize! NeTV2 FPGA Reference Design A complex system like NeTV2 consists of several layers of design. About a month ago, we pushed out the PCB design. But a PCB design alone does not a product make: there’s an FPGA design, firmware for the on-board MCU, host drivers, host application code, and ultimately layers in the cloud and beyond. We’re slowly working our way from the bottom up, assembling and validating the full system stack. In this post, we’ll talk briefly about the FPGA design. This design targets an Artix-7 XC7A50TCSG325-2 FPGA. As such, I opted to use Xilinx’s native Vivado design flow, which is free to download and use, but not open source. One of Vivado’s more interesting features is a hybrid schematic/TCL design flow. The designs themselves are stored as an XML file, and dynamically rendered into a schematic. The schematic itself can then be updated and modified by using either the GUI or TCL commands.
This hybrid flow strikes a unique balance between the simplicity and intuitiveness of designing with a schematic, and the power of text-based scripting. Above: top-level schematic diagram of the NeTV2 FPGA reference design as rendered by the Vivado tools However, the main motivation to use Vivado is not the design entry methodology per se. Rather, it is Vivado’s tight integration with the AXI IP bus standard. Vivado can infer AXI bus widths, address space mappings, and interconnect fabric topology based on the types of blocks that are being strung together. The GUI provides some mechanisms to tune parameters such as performance vs. area, but it’s largely automatic and does the right thing. Being able to mix and match IP blocks with such ease can save months of design effort. However, the main downside of using Vivado’s native IP blocks is they are area-inefficient; for example, the memory-mapped PCI express block includes an area-intensive slave interface which is synthesized, placed, and routed — even if the interface is totally unused.
Fortunately many of the IP blocks compile into editable verilog or VHDL, and in the case of the PCI express block the slave interface can be manually excised after block generation, but prior to synthesis, reclaiming the logic area of that unused interface. Using Vivado, I’m able to integrate a PCI-express interface, AXI memory crossbar, and DDR3 memory controller with just a few minutes of effort. With similar ease, I’ve added in some internal AXI-mapped GPIO pins to provide memory-mapped I/O within the FPGA, along with a video DMA master which can format data from the DDR3 memory and stream it out as raster-synchronous RGB pixel data. All told, after about fifteen minutes of schematic design effort I’m positioned to focus on coding my application, e.g. the HDMI decode/encode, HDCP encipher, key extraction, and chroma key blender. Below is the “hierarchical” view of this NeTV2 FPGA design. About 75% of the resources are devoted to the Vivado IP blocks, and about 25% to the custom NeTV application logic;
altogether, the design uses about 72% of the XC7A50T FPGA’s LUT resources. A full-custom implementation of the Vivado IP blocks would save a significant amount of area, as well as be more FOSS-friendly, but it would also take months to implement an equivalent level of functionality. Significantly, the FPGA reference design shared here implements only the “basic” NeTV chroma-key based blending functionality, as previously disclosed here. Although we would like to deploy more advanced features such as alpha blending, I’m unable to share any progress because this operation is generally prohibited under Section 1201 of the DMCA. With the help of the EFF, I’m suing the US government for the right to disclose and share these developments with the general public, but until then, my right to express these ideas is chilled by Section 1201. Posted in NeTV | One of the most common questions we’ve been asked over the past year is, “Do you do the Samsung Galaxy repair?” Until recently, we’ve had to say no because the cost of the replacement part was prohibitively expensive.
We’re excited to announce that has been fixed (no pun intended). You can now get your cracked Galaxy S3 screen repaired without breaking the bank (pun intended). Update #1: The #1 question we get asked by people reading this post is if we fix the Galaxy S4. The answer to that question is now yes. Check out our Galaxy S4 Repair post. Update #2: We received a lot of questions on this post and have done a separate post answering the top 12 questions we received. If you finish reading this post and have questions, check that post and comment there if you still have questions. Before diving into details, let me say how frustrating it is as a company when someone needs your services and you can’t help them. It’s even more frustrating when you technically can help but other factors get in the way. Samsung Galaxy S phones have traditionally fallen into this category for us. We’ve always known how to fix them, but the costs have been prohibitive. A full Galaxy S3 screen assembly runs about $250 on sites like RepairsUniverse.
If we have to pay $250 for the part, there is no way we can do the repair for less than $300 (and probably more like $350). That’s too much for most people to pay. Plus we would have spend tens of thousands of dollars just to stock the parts in our stores. It wasn’t feasible to offer this service. We spent the last couple months investigating a few possible solutions to this problem. We discovered that the Samsung Galaxy S3 has an interesting construction. In particular, the digitizer (this is what senses your finger touches) is built directly into the LCD (the part that displays the picture). Samsung refers to this as Super AMOLED technology. This is different than most smartphones where the LCD, digitizer, and surface glass are three separate components that are all fused together. This fusion of parts means, even if the LCD and digitizer are still working fine, you need to replace them to replace the cracked glass. Our hope was that this new construction of the Galaxy S3 would allow us to remove just the glass and reuse the LCD/digitizer.
It’s the LCD/digitizer combo that’s the expensive part of the assembly. The glass is pretty inexpensive. Through our research we discovered a set of tools and techniques that allowed us to separate just the glass from the rest of the components. The big trick, and what gave us the most trouble, was finding an optimal temperature to heat the surface glass to that allowed the removal of the glass from the LCD. If you don’t get it hot enough, the adhesive holding the glass down doesn’t loosen and you can break the LCD pulling on the glass. Get it too hot and you burn the LCD. Either way, you’re shelling out $250 for a full Galaxy S screen assembly. But if you get the temperature just right (we use an infrared thermometer to ensure this), the adhesive releases easily without damaging the LCD. What does all this mean for you? It means you save a lot of money. Instead of paying $300+ to get your cracked Galaxy S3 screen fixed you pay, at the time of this writing, $119. That price includes the parts, labor, and a 6 month warranty.