2012-09-06 20:12:23
Finally I got the broadband internet connection up and running in my new apartment. The server is also running, and the proof of that is that you can read these news. :-)

2012-08-28 14:41:59
Just a quick status update: The manufacturer returned to us a month ago and said that the current layout of the SuperVidel is not producable, it would yield a lot of errors and bent boards. And this despite that they had told us "OK" when we asked about this earlier this spring. So now we have to redo parts of the layout. This will probably take a week or two, but we have too much other stuff that must be dealt with first:
Earlier this summer our company where we had our daytime jobs (not Gilda Electronics) went bankrupt and since this company was started by Torbjörn and some friends in 2003 a lot of time and effort has been put into trying to save what's left. On top of that we've had to find new jobs and right now we're moving Henrik's stuff to a new apartment because the current one will be torn down. As you hopefully realize there's not a second left to work on the SuperVidel because of this. On the other hand, meanwhile we do all this, the components should be on their way to the manufacturer. So there should be no leadtime left when we've redone the layout.

During the moving to the new apartment, the server will temporarily be unavailable and you won't be able to read this news page or access the SuperVidel and EtherNat registration info for a few days.

2012-07-25 09:34:04
Recently we finished redesigning some of the inner logic of the SuperVidel FPGA design. The goal was to move the data cache from the DDR clock domain to the CT60 clock domain, and make the blitter write directly to the DDR memory, and not to the old cache. This should speed up the blitter several times.

Now that most of it is finished we have seen a 3.5 times speed increase in the blitter, and reading from the 060 should be faster now too, but has not been measured yet.

2012-07-25 09:26:52
The PCB manufacturer came back to us and said that the PCB layer stackup that they earlier had accepted is now not producable. So we'll have to change lots of via sizes and trace widths to get the right impedances using their correct stackup.

2012-07-06 21:12:56
Today we finally placed the order with the manufacturer! :)

They will start buying the components immediately, but vacations are starting now so they couldn't tell how long it should take before all components have arrived for the production. But we're hoping for September.

2012-07-02 21:54:32
We got home from Sommarhack on Sunday evening. It was an awesome party as always, with its relaxed atmosphere and beautiful surroundings close to Dalälven. The weather turned out to be much better than predicted too.
The usual people were there plus some new faces that we had only seen at Outline before. Great to see you all again! :)

While at the party we worked on our different parts of the SuperVidel project:
Pep worked on his drivers, Henrik on a GUI FW update program, and Torbjörn on a rewrite of some of the VHDL code to get a much faster blitter and 060 read/write accesses.