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Blog It is not an easy road, but it pushes you to learn
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  • Author Author: shmulikl
  • Date Created: 27 Jul 2023 6:03 PM Date Created
  • Views 688 views
  • Likes 4 likes
  • Comments 5 comments
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It is not an easy road, but it pushes you to learn

shmulikl
shmulikl
27 Jul 2023

I am an analog engineer, so the signals I acquire and process from different sensors end up at A-to-D converters; I'd like to have authority going from there. I plan to market my patent in a medical electronic area, so I decided to learn about FPGA; aside from C programming, my latest journey into the embedded domain was 8051 - you can guess how much I've been missing.


After receiving the kit, I followed the kit's enclosed instructions verbatim, and the problems started to pile up. Overburdened by failures, my desire to continue disappeared; I decided to return the kit. Jumping ahead, my communication with Randall Scassny helped resolve the issues, so I intend to stay, but time has been lost - my goal now is mainly to learn, not to win.
The issues: The enclosed instructions to start refer to www.minized.org -- the site no longer exists.
Dealing with xilinx.com, I had another glitch--I was asked to enter my Hard Drive serial number; the actual number did not work, but the random one (when the field length was satisfied) did.
Concluding... After such a tumultuous beginning, my hopes to win the contest are gone, but I did get the vibe, so I will continue to learn.
Thanks to Randall Scassny, I got help and felt the involvement and support from the Hackster community; my horizon expanded, and I enrolled in more comfortable-for-me contests.

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Top Comments

  • rajivbishwokarma
    rajivbishwokarma over 2 years ago +1
    It's a steep curve, and initially it kind of seems that you are not making progress at all. It happened to me when I was starting. Once you get the hang of it, it gets easier. And, when you say about …
  • javagoza
    javagoza over 2 years ago in reply to rajivbishwokarma

    Thanks for the reference to f4pga.org, I didn't know about it.

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  • ggabe
    ggabe over 2 years ago in reply to rajivbishwokarma

    The MicroZed chronicles are awesome - thanks for posting it.

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  • navadeepganeshu
    navadeepganeshu over 2 years ago

    That's all you need to progress! Good luck on your learning journey. 

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  • rajivbishwokarma
    rajivbishwokarma over 2 years ago

    It's a steep curve, and initially it kind of seems that you are not making progress at all. It happened to me when I was starting. Once you get the hang of it, it gets easier. And, when you say about "another glitch", did you mean that you were trying to generate a node locked license for the IPs? As you may already know from your experience of an analog engineer, everything is about the usage rights of the IP being used. This is one of the severe limitations of working with FPGAs, they're mostly vendor dependent.

    There are opensource teams working to reverse-engineer some of the FPGAs and creating open-source tools for them. It's not a production ready system but they have some decent documentations: F4PGA - the GCC of FPGAs

    And a really experienced engineer has written tons of blogs about the MicroZed board, and you might want to check them out here: MicroZed Chronicles Archive | Adiuvo Engineering

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  • dougw
    dougw over 2 years ago

    That is a good point about comfort level. You want to tackle projects that stretch you a bit, but not so much that you can't complete the project. Unfortunately, it can be very difficult to pre-determine how hard a project will be before actually trying it, especially if you haven't got a lot of experience with similar projects, so there are bound to be situations where the project ends up requiring a level of knowledge and effort that is beyond our comfort zone.

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