CAMAC

I've been getting the task of getting this new piece of data acquisition hardware running. It's like the VME bridge I worked on this summer, but it is for the CAMAC standard, which is a bit trickier. It's a bit of a nice change, though, because I've hit a bit of a snag in my FPGA project. I'm working on timing my data acquisition, and I've run into this weird communication error between software and firmware... Later today I'm going to set up in the lab and try dome debugging routines I wrote. 

In other news, last night I bottled a pilsner beer I made about a month ago. It's bottle conditioning at the moment (ie, aging and carbonating) and should be ready to drink in two weeks or so. Tonight I have to bottle a raspberry blonde I made (with 2kg of raspberries!), and tomorrow I need to go buy the yeast for a few beers I want to make tomorrow-- a Belgian Trappist Tripel, some mead (honeywine), and a blond ale that I'm going to brew with some apricot extract for flavoring. 

Bottling all of this is going to be a royal pain due to the fact that most of the bottles I have accumulated over time were never washed by their donors, so I need to do some work to get them clean... But I've got at least two weeks of fermentation time between now and having to bottle the first of the three beers I just named (likely to be the apricot ale as it's going to have the lowest amount of fermentable material in it. I've also got a big bag of grain that was slated to be for a Moosehead clone that needs to be used.... Perhaps I'll do it just for the sake of trying another lager. 

Back to work now. Finally found the CAMAC documentation page I was looking for.

NASA - Let There Be Light!

NASA -
Let There Be Light!

Tranquility

She's so pretty.

NASA -
Endeavour Brings Tranquility

Screw these.

Mandelstam variables - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

There is nothing like ducking out of work early in order to go home and do home work.
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Firmware and some other stuff.

Over the past few months, I have been working on getting my FPGA's microprocessor to acquire data at a rate that is well known (ie, whatever I tell it to be). This proved to be somewhat more complicated than expected; I ran into a few firmware issues. I had to redesign the firmware three times to get something that works flawlessly in simulation, but when I implemented it in hardware, I came across an issue that I was smart enough to think of, but not smart enough to think to correct for it before trying to implement it in hardware. In a nutshell, the firmware was doing something faster than the microprocessor software could handle, so no data was getting through.

Soooo, last night I spent a couple hours working on that. What I dislike about this project is that the FPGA software that I'm running on my computer and the supercomputer that does all my compiling is that the UI is really slow, and this is likely a combined effect of my netbook not being in any way, shape, or form designed to do this kind of thing, and the fact that the GUI is probably not designed to be run over ssh and an X Window.

On the other hand, over the last week or so I started two new beers, a simple blond lager (perhaps to be named 'Number Six', but I'm saving that name for a truly fantastic beer, kudos if you get the reference), and a raspberry ale. The raspberry ale doesn't have any raspberries in it yet, I'm waiting for most of the malts and such to ferment out before I add the raspberries. The reason why I'm doing this is because I don't want to have too much sugar in the fermenter at once; the fermentation process will likely runaway and cause a huge mess if I try to do too much at the same time. Tonight or tomorrow I shall boil down my raspberries (2kg!) and add then to a new fermenter and siphon in the ale. I'm extremely curious to see how this turns out.