There was a bug that I couldn’t figure out for the life of me. It was somewhere deep in my hobby kernel Firedrake and it made zero sense. It manifests as memory corruption, more specifically, at some point a pointer suddenly becomes zero. I tried to narrow it down with printf() debugging, but that didn’t get me very far because at that point the scheduler is already running and regular task switches occur, which have the side effect of the kernel not running in consecutive order any longer.

I’ve been printing lots of robots today on my Ultimaker 2, trying out different materials and what settings to use to print with them. I’ve used the special filaments from Colorfabb, who had the genius idea to mix normal PLA filaments with metal and wood to allow normal printers to print with different materials. And because pictures say more than 1000 words, or so I’ve heard, here is the result:

I’m back from a business trip to Nice and a lot of stress that has kept me busy since the end of October is slowly fading away, which means I can go back and actually start hacking on the Intel Edison. Which actually means that I’m going to polish up a lot of parts of Firedrake before actually turning around and attacking the Edison. It helps to have a solid foundation to bootstrap oneself with.

So, progress report on my Edison adventure: I managed to get my own kernel on it and have U-Boot boot it, which in retrospect took way longer than it should have (I’m not good at computers and embedded). Now the next issue is that the Edison has a Watchdog that will automatically reset the board if the Kernel is not periodically pinging it. The whole thing works by doing IPC from the Atom to the Quark, and so now I’m going through the Linux patch that comes with the Edison SDK to figure out how the hell all of this is supposed to work.

Received my Intel Edison today, super cute device that promises to be quite lovely (especially for me coming from an x86 background and having a hard time with the ARM on the Raspberry Pi). I especially love the super small form factor of the Edison, which makes some applications much more feasible than the Pi. I still want to port Firedrake to the Pi and have actually made quite a few changes to support different hardware personalities as well as CPU architectures.