Notices by tnt (tnt@chaos.social)

@wren6991 Wait until someone rewrites it in Rust and the cron binary will be 120Mb.

So I just learned, if you're a swiss resident you can actually get a tapeout on tinytapeout completely for free :

https://swisschips.ethz.ch/news-and-events/swisschips-news/2025/07/submit-your-design-to-tiny-tapeout-for-the-ihp-shuttle-sept-1.html

Deadline is Sep 1st so it's a bit short notice, but still doable for small projects.

So if you're a Switzerland resident, check it out ! (And maybe RT for reach ?)

"0000:02:00.0 Multimedia video controller: 3Dfx Interactive, Inc. Voodoo 2 (rev 02)"

I have a Voodoo2 on a rpi5 :D

I wonder what I can do with that 🤔

* Official channels asking manufacturer and distributor for a data sheet ... willing to sign NDA ... still no answer after 3 weeks of trying.

* DuckDuckGo and a friend who speaks chinese and has a wechat account -> Full docs in 15 mins

First board of the year 🎉

Sent to @aislerhq using their new "blitz 4 layer" service, we'll see how it turns out 😀

(And this time, I also paid for tracked shipping so it doesn't get lost ...)

And it's done already 🥳
Sending a 4ly board on one weekend and getting the board before the next one is ideal.

It was shipped one day earlier than the spec say so that might just be luck and won't work next time, we'll see.

(cc @aislerhq )

It works 🎉

Ok, the setup is very janky because of a couple of issue :

* I of course screwed up TX/RX at one place, so the usb3 connector part didn't work, had to go through the slot to go to the device, ugly but it worked.

And I swear I had tripled checked ... still screwed up :/

* The SN75lLVPE802 is meant for SATA not PCIe and doesn't have DC termination. The datasheet say you can use it for PCIe and use 330R to GND to make PCIe RX detect work.

That doesn't work :/ Had to use lower R.

@ploum @mirabilos @fosdem

"... and does not disrupt the proceedings".

Well the whole point of OP was to disrupt the talk so ...

@fosdem WTF is that bullshit ?

@ploum No it doesn't ... I've got a phone the size of that bike GPS that can transmit over a geo sat that's almost twice as far.

You can trade off speed for transmission gain. Or bigger antenna on the sat ( foldable, multi-element for beam forming ).

See Huawei’s Mate 60 Pro for instance.

Also the latest Beidou satellites ( china GPS ) actually include a SMS service !

@ploum Of course you area absolutely correct that GPS receiver is ... a receiver.

But I'd still want to point out that is is absolutely possible to make pocket sized transmitters that can reach satellites.

Benefits of large antenna in space / beam forming / coding gains / ....

It wouldn't be fast or anything, but for instance, apple sms over sat, or distress beacons, ...

Second episode in my sky130 rom compiler adventures.

https://youtu.be/j_K0H7tIKok

I know, it's long overdue ... sorry about that 😅

In this one, I'll dig into the bit cell design, trying to explain how and why I came up with the design.

b'color' in open('/bin/grep','rb').read() ?