Troubled Tuesday

The day started with my cellphone being half-dead. No data service from AT&T anywhere in the Tallahassee metro area. The day is two-thirds over now, and it is still down. Stupid AT&T!!

Next, spent $100 at the vet for some medication for the dog, AGAIN, for his persistent skin problem that never seems to go away, no matter how many treatments we give him. Stupid parasitic organisms! (Am I talking there about infectious bacteria, dogs, veterinarians, or humans in general? Hmm...)

Third, went to the auto shop, only to find that my car needs a new engine, $3,000, which is more than the car is worth. Should I fix or junk it? Buy a new car? Or used car? Every path has its risks... Stupid auto industry, they always manage to bleed you dry one way or another... Anyway, before I decide, need to find out first whether I still even will have a job this Fall...

Fourth, went to talk to someone to ask about a possible job for the Fall, only to find that he wasn't there today, and nobody knew where he was... Guess he forgot about our meeting... Guess I'll try again another day. But I am not optimistic. [long political rant elided]

On that cheery note, let's turn our attention to the tasks we need to do today... (Forgive the rant; I'm in somewhat of a dour mood today, as you can see...)

ACTUAL WORK STARTS HERE...

OK, the guys are here, and they are (1) downloading an Ubuntu ISO file for installation on a USB flash stick so we can boot the Acer into Linux from that, and then hopefully repair the problem we were having bootloading into XP and Linux.

They are also looking for output pins to use to test, say, the low 8 bits of the difference between rising and falling edge times.

Mike (or somebody) needs to figure out whether converting to integer through unsigned preserves nonstandard bit-position values. OK, I did a little test and it does not - the rightmost bit in the bit-vector is always bit 2^0 (1's place), and as you go left, the bit-values double. OK, so that's easy to fix, just multiply the carry bit-vector by 2 after converting it to integer.

Mike still needs to finish writing the FIFO_reader module which he started (barely) last week.

The guys finished identifying an array of pins (nicely arranged in sequence) which could be used to output the trailing-minus-leading edge time difference. We hooked up Ray's pulse generator, set it to generate a 3.3V (Z=50 ohm) pulse at variable pulse width. We setup an 8-bit "bus" digital input configuration on the scope. They found an input pin we can use.

Unfortunately, two problems:

1. Since we only have spaghetti wire connecting from coax cable (from pulse generator) to the board, there is lots of ringing and it is a very ugly pulse shape.
   
   
2. There is no data showing on the 8-bit output bus (constant 00 value).

To eliminate the messy input signal as the cause of the problem, the guys are writing a little FPGA-internal pulse generator module in VHDL which will generate a clean 20-ns pulse (one board clock cycle) periodically. This can be used as a baseline for testing the pulse_cap (and pulse_cap_test) modules.

Back on the XP booting issue. We got Ubuntu onto the USB stick, booted into it, and copy-and-pasted that special folder with the 3-letter name back from the Temp folder on that one partition back to the "System Reserved" (boot) partition where it was originally.

Now we can boot into Mint again, but still can't boot into XP. Emailed Juan for more assistance.