At this point, I have come to hate the hardware more than it hates me. The hardware had better start living in fear and performing consistently. It can perform wrongly—I can deal with wrong—but inconsistency is not acceptable behavior on the part of a microchip. "Chip that makes intermittent errors" is simply a long way of saying "trash."
Nonetheless, until I can think of a convincing way to hit the bad FIFO with a hammer by accident and render it completely non-functional, I'm stuck analyzing the ways (note the plural) that it screws up. At least I'm entirely justified in blaming the hardware (I've noticed that everyone in the lab blames the hardware for everything: bad bits, lost packets, global warming …), because I have a second board with a good FIFO, a good FPGA, and a good PC on which I have verified my code. We're very scientific about all this, except when I lose my temper and say, "Hah! You stupid FIFO, I shall write to you seven bajillion times! Take that!" Actually, I did this and then the FIFO, briefly cowed into submission, wrote data correctly for a while. I'm getting a little too emotionally involved.
Today I learned of a third board, but it runs off a special battery which is out of charge. Dr. Smith showed me the battery and said, "When you're hunting around for stuff in the lab, see if you can find anything that looks like the charger for this. Then we can start running this board too." Hunting around is the only way to find anything here, but usually you don't find what you're looking for until the day after you needed it. If not purposely hidden, tools, materials, and hardware are organized by the pile-on-the-counter or the shove-in-random-cabinet method.
I'm beginning to suspect this is all an evil plan of Dr. Smith's. He was going to be out next week, packing and moving house, but now he's saying that he'll be in after all because "we aren't as far along as he thought we'd be." I can see he's terribly broken up about having to come in to the lab instead of putting things in boxes. I wonder if Mrs. Smith is onto him.
374 words | May 21, 2004 08:42 PM | Rocket science