At long last, the final build of the CPC is finished, tested and working!
Assembly of the new board was pretty uneventful. I followed my usual process of dry assembly on a spare board, solder pasting with a stainless steel stencil, rapidly transferring the components from the dry board to the pasted board followed by a session in the IR oven. Continue reading
This post talks about HyperRAM, what it is, how to interface to it and how to improve the performance of high-speed parallel interfaces.
HyperRAM is described well by Cypress. It is essentially a double data rate RAM with a compact 12-line interface that masks the underlying technology of a DDR SDRAM. It can provide 333MB/s of data transfer in short bursts. Data is transferred on both edges of the clock, and the narrow bus makes it ideal for microprocessors or pin-constrained FPGAs. Continue reading
Back-ups are one of those things that everyone knows that they need, but seldom puts much time or effort into setting up and maintaining properly. My previous safety net was CrashPlan, who are exiting from the consumer back up space. This left me in a difficult place to try and find a cloud provider that supports large server backups from Linux at a consumer price.
I looked at Amazon Cloud Storage ($60 per TB per year), Google ($240 per TB per year), and Backblaze B2 at $60 per TB per year (I didn’t consider Azure, given my Linux infrastructure). While Amazon may seem a safer bet on the surface, I found their EC2 pricing unnecessarily confusing, not transparent, and potentially a “runaway” cost as everything has a price per unit. This led me to believe the consumer cloud pricing may just be a transient offer in their quest for per-byte/second billing of computing, storage and networking cloud services. I needed something that had been around for a while, had simple pricing and a focused offering. Backblaze B2 fits those criteria. Continue reading
Intelligent Toasters 