DRUPA 2012 & Beckhoff XTS Linear Drive

I spent yesterday in Dusseldorf, Germany visiting DRUPA. DRUPA is is a quadrennial trade fair for the print media industry. DRUPA is massive. It must be the largest fair of its kind within the printing industry. As a certified geek, wandering around exhibition hall after exhibition hall of incredible machines and impressive engineering was just incredible. To give you an idea of the scale of the show, there is a daily newspaper dedicated to it. It is printed every day for the two week duration of the show. Exhibitors bring complete printing presses and media handling equipment. Big, noisy, fast, machines: Proper engineering. I watched an entire copy of Jane Eyre's Pride and Prejudice being printed in front of me in a matter of seconds!

One of the companies which fascinated me was Beckhoff.

Beckhoff are an automation company and specialise in PLCs, motor/servo controllers and IO modules. They were launching their eXtended Transport System (XTS). XTS is a modular linear driver motion system, which can be connected together to form circular transport systems for moving stuff around. I've embedded a video of the demonstration unit that I had the pleasure to watch yesterday. Whilst the science behind it is nothing new, the way it has been packaged and designed is very impressive.

MIT 6.002x Midterm

Just completed the MIT6.002x Midterm exam with no mistakes. Good times.

MIT 6.002x Circuits and Electronics info

Good luck to those yet to complete it and/or putting it off.

Two Modelsim Tips You Should Know

Analogue Waveforms

Modelsim can display a signal in your VHDL/Verilog design as an analogue signal. One use for this is when you want to visualise the output of a digital to analogue converter to see if you have synthesised the waveform as you intended. To do this you can right-click on the signal name in the Wave window and select it's properties. Switch to the Format tab and select 'Analogue'. You can optionally set a maximum value for the signal so that Modelsim can stretch your waveform to fit the height of the row. For example, set it to 255 for an 8-bit DAC value.

Vi/Emacs Editor

You can tell Modelsim to use the key-bindings from your favourite editor (by which I mean Vi or Emacs). Do this by drilling down the Tools > Preferences > Text editor menus until you get to the option for switching from normal to Vi or Emacs key-bindings. The good news is it is slightly better than using normal mode. The bad news is, for Vi at least, many of the features are missing, probably because I'm used to using Vim. Search, file operations and the basic editing commands are all there, but it feels like an emulation rather than the real thing. My recommendation is to carry on using your favourite external editor by default and only use the Modelsim editor for minor changes.