Symphony

Date: 2002-05-08 10:49:22

I spent pretty much all day Tuesday trying to figure out how to interface with various Ethernet cards on the system bus level. I tore the RTL8019AS chip I acquired away from the DSP development board and plugged in the chip all by itself into power and ground. I made sure to de-assert IO Read and IO Write (which are asserted low, so I need to tie them to power to de-assert them) and the chip was driving the data bus to all ones. This, obviously, was a problem, since I'd like it not to drive the bus when it's not supposed to.

I concluded that this wasn't going to work, so I hunted down a spare ISA Ethernet card I happened to have floating around (actually, I have three; I picked them up at IS' feeding frenzy fall quarter, and now they're finally coming in handy) and soldered wires to the relevant pins on the bus. I attempted to manually convince the card to do something useful, but I had a little trouble. Stirling thought that perhaps it didn't like static operations and suggested I plug a logic analyzer into an ISA bus and see what happens. I found an old windows 98 box in the projects lab, lugged it across the hall to the digital lab, and thought about doing something with it.

By that time, it was 1730 and I was hungry and tired, since I hadn't eaten since breakfast and went rock climbing in the middle. When I got back to my room, Gem instant-messaged me as soon as I wiggled my mouse, which convinced licq (which I convinced to work from the latest cvs, although it occasionally sucks all processor cycles for ten seconds or so) to change my status from "far far away" to "online". I expect Gem to be at work from 1500 to 2000 daily, but today she didn't feel like sticking around, so she pointed out to a person of authority that she technically wasn't scheduled for today (which is a bug, since she can and is fully willing to work on Tuesday nights and usually does), so he let her leave. She visited the thrift store and generally had an entertaining time.

I fetched takeout cafeteria food and headed back to my quarters to eat. My neighbor (and recently engaged) Aaron knocked on my door with two free symphony tickets he was trying to get rid of. I thought that I probably should do something useful, since poking at Ethernet hardware took much longer than I hoped it would, but it was too tempting, especially since Gem was home randomly and I missed the opportunity to go to the symphony this school year because Gem usually worked. I eventually decided that it would indeed be a most excellent idea to attend.

A 138-page PDF is spewing from the local printer, which will hopefully provide lots of useful information to convincing the Ethernet hardware to work properly. I think I should go to class.