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.
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