I’m writing this 10 minutes before midnight since it slipped my mind during the day. Such is life.
I finally finished “Understanding Digital Signal Processing”. Overall, good textbook. The author spent a lot of time working through numerical examples of some of the more complicated algorithms, which might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it was ocassionally helpful to me. The book dragged on at the end, since a lot of the DSP tricks are very similar in nature (re: exploit some symmetry in the FIR coefficients to do the same computation with fewer/ more efficient operations).
Preskill’s Quantum Information notes also are going slowly. I’m reading about the mathematical structure of the density matrices, and how they are a convex subset of the Hermetian dxd operators. This convexity property along with some other fundamental properties gives rise to an ambiguity in the preparation of mixed states, which I found interesting. At the behest of a professor, I started reading and taking notes on Baumann’s Cosmology. Hopefully I finish the book before the semester starts up again!
With regards to the camera, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ve damaged the camera module I’m using in some irreperable way. There are definitely still bugs in my code (on reset, the camera data is written to the middle of the screen), but the test pattern confirms that I’m parsing the camera data correctly. On the upside, I no longer and using a RPi to send I2C instructitons to the camera; the solution was too slow down the I2C clock generated by the FPGA. A neat quirk that I found was that the lower the I2C clock, the further down the camera reset occurred at (something to look into…).
I decided to take a step back and get comfortable with OCaml first before doing the compiler. I had a friend show me the Jane Street dialect of OCaml and I started doing advent of code to familiarize myself with the language. Thinking of functional ways to solve problems is interesting (even though I could code up a solution much faster using another paradigm!).
That’s all for now. Talk to you later!