I managed to injure my lower back like an idiot this week. The day immediately after, I had difficulty walking and sitting without grimacing. Considering that I need to sit down for extended periods of time during the day, this was troubling. As a result, I fell down a spiral of Youtube videos and WebMD posts (not the best idea in hindsight…) to try and fix my problem.
I managed to find some stretches (things like piriformis muscle stretch, child’s pose etc.) which help with proximal pain management. I still need to go see a doctor about it (luckily, being a NYU graduate student gives you passable heath insurance), but the closest appointment I could find was on March 19th.
As a stopgap measure until then, I’ll need to change my exercise routine to include much more stretching and strengthening of the lower back. Going from being able to touch my palms to the ground with my legs straight, to not being able to bend forward at all is rather disheartening, but I’ll get back to that flexibility someday.
In more light-hearted news, I finally managed to get HDMI working (see below)!
The problem was that my original board didn’t have a proper HDMI port on it, so I was doing some really contrived things with the PMOD ports of my original dev board to try and get it working. I bought an HDMI breakout board and tried making my own differential pairs to read out from the PMOD connectors, but that didn’t work. I bought a HDMI adaptor board off of AliExpress, but the pinout of the board wasn’t compatible with the possible signal out on the PMODs (turns out, only certain pins of the PMOD can be driven as differential signals). I ended up just buying the course’s dev board which had an HDMI port already on it, and that solved all of the problems I was having (a bit wasteful, but it wasn’t that expensive…). The reason I wasn’t able to get this particular board before was that I had strange issues with the manufacturer’s website in August which seemed to have been resolved in the interim.
I’m currently working on getting a camera to interface with the FPGA to set up a real time object tracking pipeline, and this time, I’ve learned from my mistakes and designed an adaptor board for the camera. In the meantime, I’m writing and testbenching the communication protocol for the camera.
With regards to the operating systems course, I’m slowly working my way through it. I got up to pagetables and have been procrastinating doing the lab. I’m enjoying the contents so far; it really contextualizes a lot of computer things that I take for granted and demystifies the subject matter.
See you all next time, hopefully with good news!