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Archives for June, 2022

Wind Farm

June 30th, 2022

As promised I went out to explore the nearby wind farm and in doing so made another crossing of the Romney marsh!

The place is called Little Cheyne Court wind farm and it was built in 2008 after a lot of local opposition. There’s a public footpath running right through it so you can get up really close to the turbines. It’s actually pretty scary standing underneath them with the blades spinning.

After that I plodded over the marsh to Dymchurch. Dymchurch is lovely! It’s a very stereotypical slightly-tacky British seaside resort, like a time capsule from the 60s or 70s. I had a 99 with a flake from an ice cream van, it was wonderful.

VHDL generic subprograms

June 25th, 2022

I recently added support for VHDL-2008 generic subprograms to NVC. As far as I know it’s the first open source VHDL simulator to support them and allows you to write type-generic functions and procedures like this:

function fact generic (type t;
                       function "*"(l, r : t) return t is <>;
                       function "-"(l, r : t) return t is <>;
                       function "<"(l, r : t) return boolean is <>;
                       one : t)
        (n : t) return t is
begin
    if n < one then
        return one;
    else
        return n * fact(n - one);
    end if;
end function;

And then make concrete instances of the generic function:

function fact_int is new fact
    generic map (t => integer, one => 1);
function fact_real is new fact
    generic map (t => real, one => 1.0);

The is <> syntax in the declaration above picks up the default *, -, and < operators for that type from the context so there’s no need to specify them in the generic map.

assert fact_int(5) = 120;
assert fact_real(4.0) = 24.0;

Filed in vhdl - Comments closed

North’s Seat

June 25th, 2022

The highest point in Hastings is called North’s Seat and is actually just behind my old secondary school. I walked up there a few weekends ago to have a look around.

The phone mast at the top

On the summit now there’s only this huge communications antenna but apparently there used to be a lookout post and a gibbet!

Some cow parsley (?) I saw on the way down

View across the Romney Marsh

In the distance we can see a wind farm: what else could be hidden there?! Stay tuned, I’m going to explore it tomorrow.

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