Yet another mostly electronics related post, since I got some things donated the last few weeks I wanted to show here. What people just wanted to throw away, but what might be of good use to the AEBTB. One man’s e-waste is another man’s treasure.
1. Two 12 Volt 7.0AH lead batteries, out of an old Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) for some servers. Though used, they still may be useful for LED lighting charged by a small solar panel. They still measure well above 12V, though capacity might have degraded a bit. Got those a few months ago, but finally decided to take those heavy things home.
2. An abandoned aluminum “camera” case. Perfect to replace a carton I used for some electronics parts and projects, that I keep for future use and maybe show here.
3. Xilinx/Digilent Arty FPGA development board, with missing QSPI memory. The QSPI part was desoldered at work for some test or so, and this kit was just lying around and no one wanted to use it.
It could still be used with the USB/JTAG, but since FPGA are RAM based it won’t run without computer attached. OR such a QSPI has to be soldered back. That's probably not very costly. I did own a Altera Cyclone III Kit before, but since I didn’t use it because of other priorities. Thus I sold it a year ago.
Nice thing of the Xilinx is the Vivado software. Bundled with this board there should be a Node locked & Device-locked to the Artix-7 XC7A35T FPGA, with 1 year of updates. Need to figure how to obtain the license for this orphaned kit.
At least the Vivado tooling works quite well with Linux, giving it an advantage over the too much Windows oriented Altera(now part of Intel) FPGA software. Their Linux releases always felt quite untested and unstable. Bit like we have to provide it, but we don't give a damn. Not only the Altera brand is gone now, but also the open development community will choose differently and go for Xilinx I'd say.
Final note, bicycles are certainly not forgotten but I’m still in process of buying one or more new bikes. Can’t decide on buying either a new bike for my daily commute or a fun bike made of a reclaimed ALAN frame and a Gates belt drive. For both, don’t have the space or would need to take the ALAN bike indoor. According to Sun Ra: Space is the place.
1. Two 12 Volt 7.0AH lead batteries, out of an old Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) for some servers. Though used, they still may be useful for LED lighting charged by a small solar panel. They still measure well above 12V, though capacity might have degraded a bit. Got those a few months ago, but finally decided to take those heavy things home.
2. An abandoned aluminum “camera” case. Perfect to replace a carton I used for some electronics parts and projects, that I keep for future use and maybe show here.
3. Xilinx/Digilent Arty FPGA development board, with missing QSPI memory. The QSPI part was desoldered at work for some test or so, and this kit was just lying around and no one wanted to use it.
It could still be used with the USB/JTAG, but since FPGA are RAM based it won’t run without computer attached. OR such a QSPI has to be soldered back. That's probably not very costly. I did own a Altera Cyclone III Kit before, but since I didn’t use it because of other priorities. Thus I sold it a year ago.
Nice thing of the Xilinx is the Vivado software. Bundled with this board there should be a Node locked & Device-locked to the Artix-7 XC7A35T FPGA, with 1 year of updates. Need to figure how to obtain the license for this orphaned kit.
At least the Vivado tooling works quite well with Linux, giving it an advantage over the too much Windows oriented Altera(now part of Intel) FPGA software. Their Linux releases always felt quite untested and unstable. Bit like we have to provide it, but we don't give a damn. Not only the Altera brand is gone now, but also the open development community will choose differently and go for Xilinx I'd say.
Final note, bicycles are certainly not forgotten but I’m still in process of buying one or more new bikes. Can’t decide on buying either a new bike for my daily commute or a fun bike made of a reclaimed ALAN frame and a Gates belt drive. For both, don’t have the space or would need to take the ALAN bike indoor. According to Sun Ra: Space is the place.
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