The Title Goes Here

Still wrestling with car transition issues. I called SunTrust, and they are going to mail me a printout of the image of the paper title of my old car from their archives. It should be here by the end of the week. DMV could give me a duplicate title right away, but they charge $85 for the same-day service, so I may be better off waiting. However, actually making it through the end of the week may be difficult; I am dead broke until I get the old car sold. In the meantime, I might need to pawn my class ring, or something.

I started mining for Bitcoins at home (a block of 50 is worth more than $800 now!), but with those old computers, I'm not sure it's even worth the cost of the electricity. I'd probably be better off buying a nice fast ATI graphics card (once I get some money again!) and running off the GPU instead. E.g., I could buy an ATI Radeon HD 5770 for $124 and it could do about 200 Mhash/s, for a cost-efficiency of 1.61 Mhash/s/$ (not including power). Mhash/J is about 1.45, or in other words power consumption is about 138 W. That costs about $0.35/day or $2.45/wk in terms of electricity. According to the Bitcoin Mining Calculator, right now 200 Mhash/s will earn about $48.60/wk., so in other words after paying for the electricity, this card will earn about $45/wk. Seems well worth it! Anyway, we'll worry about that later...

As for real work... For today, here are some things for us to work on this week:

1) Inspect technology map of pulse_cap circuit, look for more pipelining opportunities. Try increasing speed further.

2) Write pulseform_cap module, or (probably better) have the students write it, as an exercise.

3) Finish writing FIFO_reader module, start writing C code to test it.

Tyler and David are here today. Tyler spent a little time looking through the Technology Map to see if there were any more two-LUT combinational bottlenecks, but he didn't see any. We should probably not spend too much more time right now on performance optimization. Let's go ahead and start writing additional modules.

I explained to them the expectations for the input to the our_FIFO module, and asked them to write the pulseform_cap module to combine the data from the 6 thresholds. Meanwhile, I will work on finishing the FIFO_reader module which I started writing last week.