TMK includes firmware for an ADB to USB converter which is really easy to build using a 5 volt ProMicro. For the last one I made I just cut an S-Video cable in half and wired it directly to the board. Just needs one pullup resistor.
(Typing this now using an Apple M0116 with salmon Alps keyswitches, using that very converter.)
If some of the things that the C standard left undefined had instead been made implementation defined then the compiler would at least be obligated to do something that makes sense on the target architecture, rather than having license to take the lawful-evil route. (Plenty of architectures have addressable RAM at location zero, for instance.)
For some reason this always brings to mind that moment in Red Dwarf where Kryten, devoid of his behavioural chip, deems it appropriate to serve roast human to his crewmates. "If you eat chicken, obviously you'd eat your own species as well, otherwise you'd just be picking on the chickens!"
> but the text color is usually set slightly off black (why!!??)
This can be cause by colour management. If the black is defined in terms of RGB and then converted to CMYK as part of the pre-press workflow, you'll typically have a mix of all four inks, and not necessarily 100% K - it depends on the colour profiles. For a black-only print job the C, M and Y channels will then be discarded, leaving a maybe-not-pure black.
For teaching / learning it's hard to beat Quartus Prime Lite - the virtual JTAG infrastructure (for SignalTap logic analyzer) is much better than the other options. (It's easy to create custom virtual JTAG modules to control and read data from a running design, and these will happily coexist with the logic analyzer.)
Dev board wise QMTech on AliExpress have some really nice entry-level dev boards - the Cyclone 10CL025 board, the daughter board and a clone USB-Blaster cable for programming would weigh in at well under £100.
Terasic have a bunch of different Intel/Altera dev boards, the cheapest being the DE0-Nano - personally I like the DE10-lite, but there are more modern options for those with deeper pockets.
The Tang Nano 20k is a solid and affordable choice for a Gowin chip (though be aware that this particular chip's PLLs are a bit limited and its block RAMs don't have byte enables). The JTAG stuff works but isn't anywhere near as advanced as Intel's.
For Lattice ECP5 there are several options - and these chips are well-supported by yosys/nextpnr and oss-cad-suite in general.
I quite like the IceSugar-Pro ECP5-based board and associated breakout board - but it has a quirky built-in JTAG adapter which isn't supported by the Lattice toolchain, so you'll have to use OpenOCD or OpenFPGALoader to program it, and you can't use the vendor-supplied internal logic analyzer. Its FPGA is well supported by oss-cad-suite, though, which is a big plus.
IcePi-Zero is also well worth considering, available from CrowdSupply.
ULX3S is very nice, too - but as far as I can see it's only available for pre-order on the next production run.
Thank you for your reply! I did a bit of research and, since I do want to use quite some peripherals, I have gone for the ULX3S. A big factor here was documentation and availability; If I would have been able to find a MiSTer Pi I might have gone for that instead.
I now bought a ULX3S on a whim, and will at least evaluate how usable it is for my purposes. It will take quite some time to familiarize myself with a new toolchain, which kinda sucks. One advantage of these big proprietary IDEs is that they integrate a lot of functionality into one "unit" (as far as the user/programmer is concerned), instead of having to install a lot of separate tools.
For the course, I am now considering to "support" an AMD board, an Intel one, and a Lattice one.
oss-cad-suite will give you the open source toolchain for ULX3S in one convenient package.
There are plenty of example projects and other resources, plus a discord server. https://ulx3s.github.io/
(Also, to download Lattice Diamond you'll need to make an account on the Lattice website which then needs to be activated. I tried that using a gmail account, and it was never activated - I had to use an email address related to one of my own domains.)
The notion of being expected to pay for software that was formerly free - when Windows users aren't expected to bear those same costs - does indeed piss me off.
If I were actually using Xilinx FPGAs I'd be more pissed off. Luckily the projects that interest me currently are based around Intel, Lattice and Gowin devices.
> In other words, they're saying hobbyists and beginners are on Windows anyway
I suspect they're massively underestimating how many hobbyists and students are on Linux. We're not talking about a typical demographic here, we're talking about people interested in computers and technology at precisely the level that Windows and MacOS aim to isolate from the user.
So does Quartus Prime Pro - and for specific Agilex 5 devices it's also free.
(Presumably it was too much trouble to backport support for Agilex to the Lite version.)
There are also free Linux versions of Lattice Diamond, Gowin EDA and Efinix's Efinity software.
> I see no problem with monetizing Linux users. If I am monetizing Windows and macOS users, there should be no exceptions towards Linux
Here I agree with you - Linux users shouldn't expect any special privileges here. But we're not asking for special treatment, we're asking that we continue to be given the same options as Windows users, just as we were for all previous versions of the software.
What people are objecting to is that for the latest version (and future versions) of the software an existing free tier has been withdrawn from Linux users - and only from Linux users.
"Nibble" may well have always been in use by folks, and nybble may have actually come later. At the very least, references to each spelling being in use exist for the last ~60 years.
The first book match I get for "nibble" near "byte" is in the 1964 "System 360 Assembler Language" by Don H. Stabley uses nibble. The earliest match I can find for "nybble" in relation to computers was the 1968 "Encyclopedia of library and information science". Nybble (and likely nibble) itself doesn't seem to have taken off until around the mid 1970s https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=nybble&year_st...
References to the coining of the term in 1958 of course don't provide a textual source.
I was wondering this as well. Probably when a new wave of people discovered the concept in the absence of the older wave? By contrast, "byte" has been in use continuously and widely.
Inkscape is awesome - I use it regularly for extracting design elements from PDFs and vectorising bitmaps.
It works surprisingly well for simple CAD tasks, too - I've used it in combination with TinkerCAD to produce some 3D-printed parts.
I just wish its CMYK handling was better. When I need CMYK or spot colour / overprint output I generally save as EPS, open in a text editor and adjust the source accordingly, but it would be nice if CMYK and Spot were first class citizens. (A friendlier workaround is to import the SVG into Scribus and modify the colours there.)
CMYK support is currently in active development. Martin has been working working on it for about two years, and he regularly posts update videos about inkscape [0].
(Typing this now using an Apple M0116 with salmon Alps keyswitches, using that very converter.)
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