What Happened?

I worked through a second and third video and then I realized that the PicoZed board didn't have enough pins for what I wanted. I started designing my own Zynq carrier board from the ground up... This was something I didn't want to do. I have a few other projects for work and I wanted this to be fun quick project so I was becoming dissuaded until I saw this:

Snickerdoodle

I spent a day reviewing it and then was back on track with the carrier board. Now with an open source design and a team supporting it.

I still had to make trade offs regarding the number of connectors but I think I ended up with something I will be happy with. Well at least I'll have a lot of HDL and kernel work to do to get this thing up and running.

Layout Video

I was watching a Spacex launch and saw that they played some electronic music when there was nothing particularly interesting going on it inspired me. I was about to do a small layout for a client of mine when I had the idea of capturing a frame every second of my layout. Then reducing it down so that 1 minute equals 1 hour. Partly because I thought it was cool and partly because I wanted to show them how long a layout took.

I put these two ideas together and came up with this video. It took roughly 28 hours of pure layout. I found an artist who let me put his music in the video.

I am a little concerned about seizures. There are some flashing images.

I would have been done sooner except my son was born right in the middle of it and you wouldn't believe how much energy a small 10 pound little boy takes up!

It's been a month and I've had a chance to finish this off.

I plan to add more instructional videos about different aspects of the design, specifically about

• USB Type C
• 4-Cell Li-Po battery manager
• FMC Layout with signal swapping and length tunning