What I Did in November
November 2024 was definitely the most painful month of my year. In the ysyx SoC part, I was stuck for an entire month.
I did quite a few things that month: learned a bit of Rust, refactored npc, refactored the AXI4-Lite handshake mechanism, worked with FPGA, got npc running on it, and also gave a ysyx sharing session. Of course, the most important thing was still connecting npc to the SoC.
That integration process was full of twists and turns. To make npc connect smoothly, I refactored many modules. Fortunately, in the end, it finally connected.
The hardest part was the final period of checking handshake signals. At that time, several handshake signals did not match my expectations. I repeatedly checked the SoC’s MROM module, checked it many times, and printed some signals, but the signal passed to the master was still wrong.
For those few days, I even suspected that the SoC itself had a problem, suspected that computer science no longer existed, and even wondered whether the Trisolarans had launched a sophon into my computer specifically to interfere with my experiment.
Later, after thinking carefully, I wrote several pages describing the problem and sent them to the discussion group. Very soon, someone in the group reminded me: it might be a reset problem, and I could first let npc reset for 10 cycles.
The moment I heard that suggestion, I became excited. I could feel that there was a high probability the problem was exactly the missing reset.
Sure enough, after I added the reset, it finally worked.
This problem blocked me for a full 3 days. During those days, I spent almost more than 8 hours every day thinking about this handshake signal. I am truly grateful to the people in the group.
Although I was stuck for a long time, I did gain a lot. I learned many things beyond npc, and I felt more deeply the power of focus: as long as you keep staring at one problem and thinking about it, you will definitely gain something.