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Using SoloKey2 under GNU/Linux

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As I used the i.MX8M Mini SoC in previous blog posts, I decided to explain the "magic" going on with the default boot settings in U-Boot. Understanding this gives us a solid foundation to efficiently work with the eval board during early development.

Of course it is also possible to reuse the framework for your own embedded Linux project, so it is even more important to understand the functional implications of it.

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Coding AI Assistants Considered Detrimental

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Reading the news, there are several occassions now that one can read that "AI Assistants" will make the art of programming a skill not worth acquiring. I also heard people actually telling that programming will become "unimportant" soon and that programmers will not be needed anymore. I wholeheartedly disagree with this assertion and just want to document why I arrive at this conclusion.

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Orgmode And Tikz Diagrams

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Of course it is easy to include a diagram with a post, but the standard procedure to create/edit the diagram with an external GUI tool does not resonate with me. Even back in my diploma thesis I fell in love with Donald Knuth's MetaPost system to describe diagrams in a declarative way and let the tool do the drawing.

For some LaTeX Beamer presentations I used ditaa in the meantime but inside a make flow that took care of the dependencies. The diagrams and the presentation were strictly separated. For the blog posts I did not yet have a good solution, until I switched to blogging in orgmode. Compared to ReST and Asciidoc posts, Emacs orgmode provides a much richer ecosystem with lots of hooks into other systems by means of the org-babel system.

So by switching the post source format, blogging in orgmode should actually hook into e.g. Graphviz out of the box. And indeed with a little fine tuning, this is an amazingly elegant way to include visualizations in the posts.

As org-mode (through exporting to LaTex Beamer) has also become the source format of my presentations, this new freedom easily extends into presentations and even regular PDF documents by exporting to LaTeX only. So the means shown here to produce diagrams for the blog are also usable when you want to generate Beamer presentations or LaTeX documents. As we will see, the choice of output formats is linked to the targeted use-case.

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MicroPython on Zephyr - MCXN947

(updated )

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In my recent post on MicroPython I looked at the Zephyr port of MicroPython on the i.MXRT1060 EVK. As that board has an SD card connector populated, I was able to use an VFAT SD card for storing Python programs. For the FRDM-MCXN947 the situation is different. Although the MCXN947 micro-controller features an SD controller, the Freedom board is lacking the actual SD card connector as it is not populated, probably to save money. As I am a software guy, mounting this SMD connector is more difficult than looking for software alternatives, so let's find out if we can use the internal flash or the external QSPI as a file system instead.

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Transferring Files Over TCP With Bash

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There are times when I have Ethernet working on an embedded GNU/Linux board, but no tool available to actually transfer files. Latest example is the Yocto build for an i.MX evaluation board from NXP that I just built. The system lives on the SD card, so adding a package would mean to reconnect the SD card to my development machine, copy the file(s) and put it back into the board. And I am just too lazy for that. The EVK has an IP address on my local network, so there must be an easy way to transfer a file with standard tools, right?

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