In 1968, when the poet Anne Sexton published the Ballad of the Lonely Master Vater in the Hudson Review, she entered into an already increasingly public discourse regarding women's private sexual experiences. A unique historical moment, the 1960s and 70s saw a rise in the cultural legitimization of previously taboo sexual practices and artistic articulations of such practices. In defiance of past prohibitions, Second Wave Radical Feminism claimed masturbation as a quote, political act of individual liberation from confining social structures, the home, marriage, the family, and insisted that women's sexuality was life affirming and non-objectifying. Subsequently, female collectives, sex workshops and masturbation manuals enjoyed unprecedented popularity and helped contribute to what Jane Juffer has termed the quote, mainstreaming of masturbation. This mainstreaming enabled female cultural performers to further explore what it meant to be a sexual woman. In particular, artists such as Miriam Shapiro and Judy Chicago championed what is today known as a vulvic or cunt art to art historians, which can be defined as a type of essentialist aesthetic that focuses on the universal physical characteristics that all women share, their sexual organs or genitalia. While cunt art has been both celebrated as a symbol of sexual impairment and both criticized for its reductionism, this aesthetic continues to play an important role in the construction of sex, gender, and femininity. One contemporary artist in particular, Tracy Emman, continues to push the boundaries of this tradition. Specifically, Emman's many depictions of the masturbating female, which are mostly joyless, problematized, and affirmative, and non-objectifying view of sexuality in their very objection. In this presentation, I will explore the ways that Emman fashions the masturbating and sexually transgressive female body, paying particular attention to how her carefully cultivated artistic persona and her chosen subject matter question the possibility of sexual fulfillment in this postmodern world, both solitary and communal. Cultural historian Thomas Lacker has identified two masturbation narratives that run through contemporary history. The first one as, quote, a mode of liberation, claim to autonomy, and pleasure for its own sake, and masturbation as selfish, purposeless, meaningless, destructive of human relations, and representative of commercial excess. These two narratives are useful in characterizing how artistic conceptions of masturbation have evolved from feminist art of the 1970s to the postmodern feminist present. Norma Brood and Mary Garard have persuasively argued that feminist art has helped form postmodern thought, quote, the understanding that gender is socially constructed, the widespread validation of non-high art forms such as craft, the questioning of the cult of genius, are all qualities associated with postmodernism. What postmodernism does not inherit from 1970s feminist art traditions is a preoccupation with celebrity, materiality, consumerism, and commodification. These contemporary concerns are, however, directly relevant to third wave feminist movements of which emin is arguably a part of. Third wave feminist movements have also attempted to both challenge and liberate various sexual ideologies and practices such as sadomasochism, pornography, and prostitution in essence to use them politically. Leo Bersani has criticized the past pastoralization of sex and has asserted that sex is not, quote, a second wave feminist liberal such as Catherine McKinnon and Andrea Dworkin would have it, an expression of tenderness and love, but again structurally anti-communal, anti-egalitarian, anti-nurturing, anti-loving, unequal in its essence. Straddling these two philosophical modes, Tracy Emman's work articulates a desire for tenderness and love, but ultimately questions its possibility. Sex for emin is tinged with loss, objection, humiliation, objectification, commodification, physical and psychological injury, and power games between unequal partners.  Interpretations of sex acts have been complicated and controlled by historical and social context and the sex act changes and shifts its significance depending on the dictates of culture and taboo. In the post-modern moment, one that defies authoritative definitions and challenges both stability and significance, the sexual act is threatened by a loss of meaning. In post-modernism or the cultural logic of late capitalism, Frederick Jameson criticizes the commodification and popularization of so-called offensive forms of contemporary art, claiming that their subversive qualities are effectively nullified by their commercial ones. Jameson's cautionary parable of the end of the theories of transgression concludes with these transgressive artworks finally called on to undo themselves and to abolish the very logic on which their attraction repulsion was based on in the first place. Jameson's disgust with post-modernism hinges upon its symbolic castration of politically, socially, and sexually subversive forms of resistance. The mainstreaming of kink, SNM pornography, and prostitution may help legitimize these practices, but problematically, such mainstreaming diffuses any radical potential. Expressing a similar sentiment in the November 1999 issue of art news, Lyndon Auckland somewhat laments, quote, in a post-modern world like ours, badness is acceptable in women. It indicates feistiness and it's a sign of energy and unconventionality. This bad girl persona adopted by many female artists allows for simultaneous transgression and titillation. Quote, embracing the overly pornographic and confessional have become a means of releasing women's sexuality from the comforts of a progressive eroticism and turning that into an angry voluptuousness. For many female artists, then, this practice allows them to subvert traditional gender roles, sexual ideologies, and practices. However, the mainstream has not only embraced badness, but also established a market for it. This leaves radical artists to consider what exactly, just exactly how they should navigate badness in a capitalist environment that thrives on and promotes such labels. Within the economic and sexual politics of the 1990s, the YBAs, or Young British Artists, the group that Emmett is traditionally associated with, achieved an especially notorious reputation for flaunting convention, participating in and promoting consumer and pop culture, and posturing themselves irreverently against serious conceptual art of the 1980s. The YBAs, championed by advertising executive Charles Sachi, and originally collectively exhibited in the appropriately titled Sensation Show in 1997 at the Royal Academy of Art, have been at the center of contemporary art controversies regarding the use of graphic violence, sex, and other scandalous subject material in their art. Among the many artworks displayed at the Sensation Show, Tracey Emmond's infamous tent, everyone I have ever slept with, 1963 to 1995, created an uproar when people, perhaps willingly misinterpreted the work as a distasteful display of sexual bravado. It wasn't, quite literally, it was everyone she had ever slept with, including her grandmother, her brother in the womb, and all sorts of other non-sexual partners. So if the public reads and celebrates sex in Emmond's work, perhaps it is because Emmond herself consciously encourages it, and quote, if I was in denial about my sexuality, she has said, I'd be in denial about aspects of my work, which deal with personal revelations. Emmond's claim both reflects and fosters the popular view held toward her work, that it is directly related to her personal experience and that there is no distinction between Emmond the artist and Emmond the woman. While such a blatantly autobiographical reading is tempting, it ultimately threatens to reduce Emmond's art. Rosemary Bederton poses a more sophisticated reading of Emmond's artistic body and the function of her body of work. Quote, through her work, she territorialized her own body as the signifier of Mad Tracey from Margate who operated as a transgressive figure within the conventions of the art world. Especially in regards to the emotionally charged and sexually explicit nature of Emmond's work, the impulse to allow slippage between artist and woman, art subject and object creates a messy terrain for us to navigate. The perils of a woman promoting her art as autobiographical are connected to the anxiety society continues to feel about the female who is simultaneously sex symbol and serious artist, both cerebral and embodied. Third wave feminist critic and writer Naomi Wolf has candidly addressed this double standard.  I want to be a serious thinker and not have to hide the fact that I have breasts. I want female sexuality to accompany rather than undermine female political power. Similarly, Emmond's reputation as a serious artist is often challenged by her personal appearance, taste and activities. The fact that she models for Vivian Westwood and Bombay sapphire gin dresses in expensive and provocative clothing and attend celebrity functions. I am feminine, Emmond has said. I like nice clothes and unfortunately, a lot of people don't take me seriously because of this. Trivials this might seem, the reality behind Emmond's gripe is nonetheless significant. As if directly challenging her detractors an important aspect of Emmond's work is the reclamation of the female body as a spectacular sexual site. Her strategies include emphasizing the physical, the fashionable and the erotic aspects of the body. Works like My Beautiful Legs and Sometimes I Feel Beautiful suggests pleasure in personal grooming and aesthetic self-objectification. In My Beautiful Legs, the focus is entirely on Emmond's gams from the knees down, clad and stylish probably expensive designer heels. Sometimes I Feel Beautiful is a photograph of Emmond in the bathtub looking tanned, pretty and peaceful. In this moment of feeling beautiful, Emmond actively desires and courts the viewer's gaze. She is both artist and the model and as such disturbs traditional notions of aesthetic modesty and vanity. When Emmond feels beautiful, she's going to show off critics be damned. Not only has Emmond participated in the fashion marketplace as a model, but she has also worked as a designer for high-end labels such as Longchamp. Through her 2004 collaboration with that company which resulted in a limited edition luggage and handbag line, Tracey Emmond for Longchamp later caused her regret. Emmond clearly learned from her foray into the world of consumer merchandising and used her experience to create more challenging conceptual art. For example, Emmond's Longchamp creations featured detachable rosettes. According to the advertisements, the rosettes featured an Emmond hand-drawn Longchamp logo and a handwritten name of a street, city, or hotel which reminds her of a moment of love. Each rosette is therefore an original signed by the artist. In 2005, Emmond made another series of rosettes that referred back to her Longchamp ones though instead of the name of a location, action, cut, oh yes, and more featured drawings of a masturbating woman in the center of the rosette. Aside from the obvious sexual signification, the blue ribbon quality of the rosette design carries with it connotations of competition, success, and public display. Emmond's rosettes retain their material history as coveted awards and also obtain new significance as images praising female sexual behavior and bestowing status on it. Despite these more celebratory, fun depictions of the female body, Emmond mostly traffics in disturbing, traumatic, and alienating images of sexual subjugation. Various types of rape, sexual abuse, and joyless board masturbation stand out among Emmond's monoprints as an obsessive theme. And I didn't do anything wrong.  The figure is rendered in Emmond's trademark scrawl, convulsed into submissive posture of sexual presentation and positioned awkwardly almost uncomfortably. The phrases circulating around the figure might be conceived of as thought bubbles, the monologue or dialogue accompanying these weird fantasies Emmond alludes to. Since the figure is solitary, we have to assume that she is either telling the viewer or an imagined remembered other not to leave. In any case, there is loss or fear of abandonment implicit in the work and intrinsically connected to the sex act. Particularly, the figure's insistent, I'm really fucking, stands out as suggestive of Lacker's second type of masturbation narrative, the delusional meaningless type. A similarly depressing depiction of masturbation is I used to have a good imagination. This work shows a woman sitting on a couch underneath what looks like a gun. The title phrase scrawled across the bottom of the print. The threatening presence that the gun brings to, the threatening presence of the gun brings to mind victimization.  In Emmond's image, however, the gun is autonomously aimed at the woman whose joyless masturbation is posited by the text as a result of a lack of imagination. Is this figure indicative of punishment? Does masturbation lead to a drying up of creativity instead of fostering creativity? Or is the figure's lack of imagination related to this post-modern condition of overstimulation? Observing the banality implied in such an image of compulsive compulsory masturbation, Jennifer Doyle suggests that quote, the work equates a failure of imagination with masturbation, with the excesses of everyday desire. The woman in the picture seems like she might be bored. The picture seems drawn out of boredom. Apparently, the figure has masturbated so extensively that she has lost the ability to create fantasy narratives and has become jaded. In this image, Emmond makes the titillating seem everyday or commonplace and she turns the sexualized object into the bored and boring subject. One might ask where the liberation is present in such a vision. Knowing myself is perhaps Emmond's most self-consciously critical masturbation piece. It features the familiar scrawled female spreading her legs, this time rendered in violent red lines under a chunk of Emmond's typically misspelled prose. And there's a prose. Yes, I didn't spell it that way. Sometimes I try not to masturbate. Sometimes I make myself go weeks and weeks without even touching myself sexually. I, my self-esteem, instead of going lower, becomes higher because I no longer have to deal with my ever-boring sick fantasies. This piece does in stark contrast to the feminist pieces from the 1970s where women, quote, emphasize the materiality and specificity of the female body precisely to liberate women from ignorance about their bodies and shame about sexual pleasure. With this past optimism in mind, the title of Emmond's work is actually ironic. Knowing oneself is not the positive and beneficial activity encouraged by second-wave feminism and pro-masturbation movements is actually painful, disturbing, detrimental, and, once again, boring.  The confessional tone of the piece hinges on the language of deprivation, even asceticism, refraining from sexually pleasuring oneself actually saves the figure from wallowing in her sick fantasies, which, for all of Emmond's candor, are omitted. In response to this negativity, Chris Townsend has noted, quote, the attention to history in these prints is frequently upon sexual experience, masturbation, anal, and vaginal intercourse, and its inevitably catastrophic aftermath, a collapse into hysteria and emotional distress. Townsend's fusion of the sex act and its negative outcomes is significant in respect to Emmond's own refusal to separate sex from trauma. Both articulations emphasize the risk inherent in female erotic expression. While feminist art of the 1970s, such as Judy Chicago's, celebrated a binding female essentialism, and emphasized fertility, egalitarian sex, and special feminine knowledge, Emmond's post-modern, post-traumatic sex leftovers emphasize objection, loss, pain, and disembodiment.  Whether masturbating or engaging in intercourse, the hastily rendered figures in Emmond's monoprints and fabric arts suggest that sex is either a distraction, an excessive compulsion, or a way to assert dominance and power. Emmond's figures are always blind, whether shutting their eyes, and fantasizing in isolation, or bearing their heads into pillows when engaging with other partners. The phrase, I'm really fucking, thus becomes the slogan for the disconnect Emmond subjects feel, both from their bodies and from themselves. Thank you.


OK, so I wanted to talk about the I4TFPGA, because I've been working with them quite a bit lately. And I thought it'd be a nice introduction. So it's going to be very quick, just showing off some of the things I've worked on without too many details, I mean, depending on which thing. Hopefully to give you the taste to actually try and work with them, or if you have any question on any specific project that I will present, just ask. And I'll try to answer them. This is mostly basically a series of pictures, so I'm going to be just commenting on them. So first, a quick introduction to the I4TF family. I like them because they're really small. This is the UP5K, or the I4TFUltraplus 5000, which is one of the largest one. By ultraplus, they mean ultra low power, which mean it's slow. That's a translation. So don't expect, you know, artics or exciting levels of performance, stuff like that. The frequency we're talking about here is 50 to 100 MHz, or stuff like that. Getting your logic to be clocked at several 100 MHz is not something you're going to achieve there, not without a lot of care at least. Another reason I like them is they're fairly easy to use. Like, you don't need 10-voltage rails. You just need the IO voltage that you use, 3.3 volts, then the V-core, which is 1.2 volts. And it's being low power. You can actually just use a linear regulator, and that works just fine. The first board I designed for the I4TFUltraplus, I didn't know what kind of power consumption it's going to have, so I put a switching mode power supply capable of providing one amps. And I did a test design basically toggling every flip-flop in the FPGA at 100 MHz while overvolting it. And it was consuming like 40 milliamps or something. So there was quite a bit of margin there. I would say, if you know what I mean. Actually, the switching converter has a special low power mode, and it never leaves the low power mode, like the discontinuous conduction. Yeah, it's a TI switch. And this one is particularly available in the QFN48 package, which means it's fairly easy to solder at home without big equipment. Even just a soldering iron is enough to solder it. That's the general structure of the UP5K.  So it has two SPI cores and two I2C cores, which you can use. They're really meant to be used from a soft-core CPU inside it because they have a bus interface with some registers and stuff like that, like you'd find in a normal microcontroller basically. Something else interesting it has are those SPRAM blocks. So it has one megabits of SPRAM stands for single port RAM, which is fairly unusual in smaller FPGA to have that much SRAM present on them. It's really useful to have it on board basically because being in QFN48, you don't have that many I2C. It has DSP blocks, eight of them. So they are 16 by 16, and so you can do multiplication. So if you want to accelerate some function. And it has these are much smaller block RAMs, but they're much more granular. They're only four kilobits, but they're dual ports. So you have one read port and one write port. You don't have like dual read, dual write. There's like 30 of them for small 5.0s and stuff like that. And then you have the actual logic slice, which is a forward-based architecture. They're grouped by eight. You can use or not the flip flops. And so you have classic lutes and a flip flop. And we'll see more details later. Some other interesting features is the NVCM, which is a non-volatile configuration memory. So it can store its own bit stream internally. Does this one time programmable? So yeah. Apparently, some people tested it's more like three, four times programmable. So you can actually overwrite it a few times. But it's really not guaranteed at all. Otherwise, it can just fetch its configuration from a normal SPI flash. And most of the pins that are used for configuration can be reused for user IO after, which mean that you can have the bit stream for your configuration. And then some user data stored in the same flash and access it from user. Basically. That's the detail on the PLB structure. So you have some dedicated carry logic, which is really inflexible in the sense that if you're familiar with Xilinx, FPG, and stuff like that, the carry logic is a bit more flexible. And you can actually abuse it to implement something else than an actual carry logic for an adder. In case you're not familiar with that. Here, really, you can implement an adder with it. And that's pretty much it. Then you have a fourlets, which is a lookup table. So it provides any function, depending on the four of the inputs, optional registers. And what's important to note is that the group by eight and the clock enable and set reset lines are actually shared by those eight, which means that if you have a flip flop that use an enable, and that's the only flip flop that use that particular enable signal, you just will sacrifice basically seven other flip flops for nothing. Because you can't use them. Something that I found really strange in that FPGA contrary to Xilinx is that the set reset here, when it's configured in synchronous mode, is actually gated by the clock enable. So if clock enable is at zero and you send a reset, the flip flop won't actually reset. That's rather strange. That means that when you code your logic, you have all the advantages. You should basically use asynchronous resets. As the synthesis tool will have no choice, but to basically do a logic or between the resets and the clock enable signal to generate the actual clock enable signal. Just a little detail, but if you have a lot of flip flops that have resets with clock enables, it can drastically reduce your logic use and improve your timing. That's the board I've been working with mainly. I started with a board from Lattice, but they're rather limited. And this is a board that's becoming available, which is really nice. Because when you have the UP5K itself, it has two P-mods, three P-mods, sorry, connector. So if you're not familiar, they kind of are standard for extension. It's basically 8IO and power here, here, and here. And the FTDI is used for programming the flash. And once the programming is done, you can actually use it to communicate with the host to send, receive data. You can either use SPI or UART to talk to the host, or both at once. Actually, they use different pins. You have a very large flash, which is like 64 megabits, I think. And the bit stream uses only one megabits. So if you want to put user data in there, that's very doable. So something else about that FPGA is that it's supported by an open source tool chain. So you don't actually have to use any of the latest tools if you don't want to. You have uses, which does the synthesis part. So for those, maybe I should have asked, who doesn't know what an FPGA has? OK, good, because I didn't explain, but yeah, whatever. So the flow in an FPGA is often split into two tasks. The first one is called synthesis, which basically takes your very low code, whatever, your HDL, and converts it into logic elements that correspond to your FPGA family. And that's what we use this does. And it will generate a net list, which series of LUTs and registers and stuff like that. And then the next step is done by next PNR. And that's place and route, which is basically take those logic elements and actually decide where on the FPGA to place them and how to connect them using the available cells that are there and the available routing that are there. And that's done by next PNR. Now, those tools are constantly improving. But if you're looking for the most extreme timings or stuff like that, the vendors tools still provide, like an advantage, they're still better. Although the gap is closing rather fast with new algorithms and stuff like that, but yeah. So one nice thing about those FPGAs, you can overclock them, of course. So I noticed in the vendor tools that when you simulate the timings to know what frequency will your FPGA reach, your design, what frequency can you run it at. And you have to input what's your tolerance on the temperature. Do you want it to work from minus 20 to 85? Or are you going to be at the constant 25C? Or stable is your power rails? Like can it dip to one volt? Or is it going to be a consistent 1.2 volt? That kind of stuff. That has huge influence on to the results of the timing. And so I was wondering, OK, well, what's the actual speed like instead of what's predicted? And so I did two tests. The first thing is to take the timing model that we use in the open source tools and predict frequency and then measure it. And so I did that with a ring oscillator. So you're basically in the FPGA, you ask him to do a chain of inverters. And if you use an odd number of inverters, well, it will oscillate because it constantly switch. And so using the timing model that you have, you predict how fast it's going to oscillate. And then you compare that with the frequency that you actually get. And that's this result. Like the timing model we have for the routing logic and the logic element and the routing predicted that it should oscillate at 11.1 megahertz. When you actually measure it, it's 17.44. So there is definitely some margin there. And the other thing is the dependency on the v-core and temperature. I didn't actually test temperature yet, although I didn't see a lot of variation there. But I mostly tested the OK, it's nominal 1.2 volt. But what happens if I provide it with 1.1 and 1.3 kind of stuff? And so I used those two test boards. They're basically other boards that are meant for something else where I just populated the FPGA and didn't populate the v-core regulator. And I just feed in a voltage from an external power supply, basically. That's for the LP384. That's the smallest FPGA in that family. It comes in QFN32. It only has 384 logic elements, which is really small. But it can still do very useful things with it. And that's for the UltraPlus 5K. Again, just the FPGA, basically. What's necessary to load a bit stream in it and manually feed the voltage. And that's the result I got. So basically, I normalized the output frequency, which means at the nominal 1.2 volt v-core, you get one normalized frequency. But you can see that if you push it to 1.4 volts, you almost get 50% faster frequency. I also measured the power consumption. It's not graphed, but it's not significantly higher. The heat is also not, I mean, I can't. It doesn't show up at all in the thermal camera. Like I couldn't see any difference between the board and the jib itself. So it's so low power that the heat doesn't matter, which means if you want to push your design a little bit, well, instead of putting a 1.2 volt v-core regulator, you can put a 1.31. And it's just going to go faster. But on the other hand, you also have to be careful that if you voltage somehow dips, yeah, it's going to fall pretty hard. The current timing models pretty much are there. So that's basically, we simulated the worst case, basically, it's around here. So some fun applications to do with those. The first one is digital to analog converter using PDM, also known as delta sigma. And this might look more complicated than the standard delta sigma. But if you just go with the basics, just take this pin. You just go through a resistor, well, two in series. That's just one. And then capacitor, that's basically a low pass filter. And so you just output a density of purses, and you average them. That gives you an analog voltage. Then you can add the second resistor here, which, if you follow this relation, kind of gives you more resolution bits. The general idea is that those two resistors, they form a resistive adder. And so you can have the first MSB, basically, which fix globally where you are on the voltage range and then use the LSB with a much higher resistance here to kind of tweak that and get more resolution out of your converter. And so these would be these. That's just the output buffer. And then there is this neat trick that I read about in some article on the internet. And so the problem, of course, of those kind of DAC is the output noise, right?  And even with the smoothing of the capacitors, just a simple LC filter, it doesn't filter that much. No, because it's delta sigma, you try to push as much of your noise into the higher frequencies. But still, it's not perfect. And this AC couples the edges, but inverts them. This is the opposite of that bit, which means it's kind of an active noise cancellation, which actually works very well. So that's the test board that I used to test this. And I fed that to a Rodentschwarz spectrum analyzer. This is the noise output in a unipolar mode. So the two lower lines, inverted lines, are disabled. And this is the output with the active noise cancellation, which means there's one peak that's still above the noise flow of the analyzer, but that's it, which I found was for a couple of more resistor and one capacitor, that's worth it. Especially since one of the application I'm using this for is to tune VCXO. And so I want as clean as possible output, basically. Another application, kind of the same board, that's tracking the phase of GPS PPS. So I'm assuming most people are familiar with the, if you want to do a cheap GPS DO, you take any GPS receiver, you take the PPS output, you take a 10 megahertz oscillator that you can tune, and then between two PPS, you count how many 10 megahertz cycles you got.  But given it's based on the PPS, well, you get one pulse per second, which means you only get one measurement per second. And so if you want to achieve very fast transient response, but still good precision, you have a trade off there, because you get 10 million cycles every once a second, you can only get 100 ppb, kind of maximum error detection. So you need to average over a lot of time, and so your response is pretty slow. So one method to get more precise measurement is not only track the number of cycles you get, because hopefully you can get to 10 million exactly, but also track the phase of that PPS pulse versus your actual 10 megahertz clock. And that gives you more input to your tracking loop. And that's what this is designed to do. You basically get the timing diagram. But the general idea is that you take your 10 megahertz clock, you divide it by some number. I chose 8, because it's just easier to divide by 8 than 0.10, but it doesn't matter. And you track the phase of the PPS to that. And the way you do this is this flip flop is used as a phase comparator. And so when the PPS happens, since it's connected to the clock and the data is connected to 1, this output will become high. And it will start charging that capacitor slowly. Well, actually not that slowly, but it will start charging that capacitor. And when the next edge on that clock happens, which is what you're comparing the phase to, it will reset it. And so it will disable it. And so at that point, because those are inverted signal, the capacitor will start discharging. And so what you do is you have a discharge resistor, which is much higher than your charge resistor. And so that's basically a dual slope ADC. You charge a capacitor pretty quickly to convert a time interval into a voltage. And then you discharge it much more slowly so that you convert back that voltage into a time interval, but which is multiplied into a much longer time interval. And then that longer time interval, you can measure it using a counter and report that to the host to do your phase measurement basically. That's the board that does that. And so you get basically, I use the LP384 here, because it's the smallest size for the FPGA. That's the passives to do the dual slope ADC. And this is the perl density modulator represented before to control the O6O. And that's the I2C interface, basically, on those pins. That's the phase measurement. It's rather noisy, but those variations are actually a very, very small time interval when you scale them down. And so it's not really a problem. Like a variation of one cycle of the 10 megahertz would be much, much higher than this. And so even if it appears noisy, it's just because I'm using something I didn't present here. But to detect when the capacitor is fully discharged, this is a very low voltage, like 0.1 volts or something. And I'm using a differential input of the FPGA as a comparator, which is not really designed to do that. And because the voltage slowed down really slowly, the threshold isn't perfect. And so you get some noise, but in practice, it works fine. It doesn't matter. Something else I did with this FPGA is implement a full speed. USB is confusing. And because USB full speed is just CMOS 3.3 volt, right? They say it's differential, but in fact, it's just two independent IO that most of the time, you toggle them one against the other, but not all the time. And so the FPGA IO can drive that without an external phi. That's the structure of the core. So you get basically the FPGA IO. This layer deals with all the low level stuff of USB, and really, really low level, like things like bit stuffing and stuff like that to ensure the appropriate number of transition. Then you've got the layer that actually creates and receive actual packets. Then this goes up to this, which is the transaction layer. So if you know a little bit about USB, the transaction layer, you get a token from the host, and then you have to reply within six-bit time with a packet of your own. And then you're going to get another one. And that's what's called the transaction layer. But the response time is really fast. I guess it's six-bit time at 12 megabits. So that's not a lot of time. Not enough for CPU to respond. And so this is coded in logic. But to be fairly flexible and be able to do it easily, this is actually coded as a microcode state machine. So if you look in the source, you'll see actual opcodes, except those opcodes are really, really specific to USB. There is an opcode that says start the transmit of a packet or compare the length of a packet. That kind of stuff, really specific to USB. It only has seven different opcodes, I think. But it basically implements, if you look at the USB spec, you'll find state machine diagrams that implement the transaction. It basically implements that in microcode. And yeah, it has a transmit and receive buffers for the different endpoints compared to some code that you would find in a microcontroller. Because it's very similar to what you would find in an Atmel or something like that. It's basically what they call the SIE, the serial interface engine or something. The only difference is that usually in an SIE, you've got a fixed number of endpoints with fixed size buffer. This doesn't care. You can, I think you can have 16 endpoints in USB, I think. Yeah, is it 16 or 32? I don't remember. Whatever, I mean, if you want to. If you want to. Exactly, here, if you want to implement 16 endpoints in and 16 endpoints out, you can assign the buffer independently to whatever endpoints with whatever, either single buffered or developed buffered. And so if you want to implement like a 16 channel UART, you can do that with that. It doesn't matter. You have full flexibility there. If you want to implement control endpoint on something as than endpoint zero, you can also do that if you want. I'm not sure who you're going to talk to, but whatever. So some of the fun application quickly, MyPyDSI and talking to those iPod screens. That's a board to also talk to MyPyDSI, but larger size screens. I just, I sorted it not long ago. I haven't actually tested it. I haven't even flashed a bit stream to it yet. So I don't know if it works, but it's at least designed to do that. Yeah, driving LED panels. That's a re-implementation of a kind of old school text mode that you would find in Commodore 64 or stuff like that, which is a text mode, but with programmable glyphs and pallets and stuff like that, except it drives display at a 1080p resolution and a 60 frame per second. But it's text mode because I don't have the RAM to put a frame buffer on there. But you can still do fun stuff like re-implementing breakouts or simulating like a graphical output in text mode. Yeah, a few links to the documentation from Lattice. It's not always super clear, but at least it exists, right? The links to the tool chain, if you want to install it and start working with them. A couple of very interesting IC channels that I definitely recommend. And then a link to GitHub repo, where I basically put all my Ice 40 stuff. And that's it. Any questions?  I just really wanted to show a few applications and tips you can do. But if you want to talk to me about any particular application or have more details or stuff like that, because yeah, I know it was just pictures and me talking over them basically, so yeah. We have a second microphone. Yeah, so how many pins are there on the package? So the package is 48 pins for the UltraPrix 5K. And I think you can use 38 of them as IOs. Some of them have some restriction. There's three IOs, which are kind of, they're meant to drive an RGB LED. So they are constant current sync, which you can actually program which current they run at. You can use them as normal IOs, but then they are open drain. And I saw some DSP blocks on the diagram. Yes, you have eight of them. Is that of any use like for Channelizer? Yes, I actually have, I didn't show it there, but I actually have a P-Mode with a SX 2057, which is a lower, it's meant as a lower transceiver, but really you get just IQ data. What's interesting about it is that you get one bit IQ data, just highly oversimpled one bit IQ data. And then for transmit, you have to use the delta sigma third order to generate that one bit IQ. And for the receive side, you basically take it, then I run it through CIC and then through an FIR filter to get lower bit rate, higher bit depth RF. And I'm planning to use the DSP block to implement FIR. So even SDR might be between the... Yeah, I mean, it's low rate SDR, but I'm actually, this could actually implement like a GSM transceiver technically, because that SX 2057 does run into the 900 megahertz band. And the only thing I'm missing is a 30.5 megahertz crystal or VCO, because that's kind of the only rate that I would have that would be convenient to have the 278.8 and 33 in GSM, whatever. Yeah, we have a clock generator. Yeah, so the clock generator, I'm waiting for it, yeah. Well, you can have one. Thank you.


Education in the 21st century has changed in many ways, and by and large these changes are due to the availability of a gigantic pool of educational resources on the web, among them video. In the following I will outline our principles of creating and using video in the context of linguistic education at an academic level. I will show how our videos are produced, so this sort of scenario. I will show how our videos are integrated into class and how our students use our videos as you can see over here, perhaps on a phone. And I will also try to answer the question why we make our videos available on YouTube and not within the protected zone within any other platform. Let us start with a question. Where can video enhance a traditional class? There are several options of integrating video within the complex scenario of a class at university level, which normally expands over a period of a dozen weeks or even more. For example, we could produce preliminary videos that contain the administrative and organizational details of a class and make them available prior to class start. In the past, this information, of which you can see a fragment over here, was generally made available in print in the departmental class descriptions or like in many universities today. It is published on the university wide campus management system, but be honest, have you ever cared about such information? Many students don't read it and they come into class totally uninformed. Why not provide this information by means of a short preliminary video that summarizes the goals, the central topics, the organization of the class, its central requirements and the deductive principles applied to name a few. The actual delivery of such video based preliminary organizational details can be simple. All you need is a link to your video and if this information still needs to be printed out, maybe the quick response code or in short the QR code that can be made available to access this video may be of some help. The availability of this information prior to class start frees the class instructor from explaining all these details to his students. Instead of wasting the first in class meeting with administrative details, the class instructor can now straightforwardly start with a class content. But where else can we use video? Well, once a class is running, a suitable option is to create a video that contains the content of a class unit. An alternative option is to use several videos related to a unit. For example, one that contains the central content of a class, one that suggests particular in class activities and one or even several videos that provide explanations or provide exercise materials plus solutions. Once the videos are ready, it's up to you and your deductive concept how you want to use these videos. On the Virtual Linguistics Campus, we use all these options. The preliminary videos, we call them class descriptions, inform our students about all class related organizational details and make them available prior to each class. Content delivery is realized by two different video types. On the one hand, we have screen casts where we record the central screen activities, for example, in connection with software training. And we have complex e-lectures where we deliver the linguistic content standing in front of an active board of this kind. For both, we apply the following principles. The presenter must be visible. The videos should not be longer than 20 minutes. And what is being presented should, if possible, be made available in print. Now these principles also apply to the remaining types of video we are using on the Virtual Linguistics Campus. For example, to the in-class activity suggestions. These are video productions that are produced together with our students. That inform those who use the e-lectures in accordance with the inverted classroom model and demonstrate to them how they could, as one option, structure their in-class activities. The remaining videos are of an explanatory kind. Either they take up the questions put forward by the community, or they provide our students with model solutions about class-related questions. That these cannot be made freely available on the web should be clear. We want our students to work before they see the answer. And how do we produce these videos? Well, first of all, you need a studio. That is a room with appropriate lighting, a camera, and the setup needed to record your video. And by means of the camera, you record the presenter in action. At the same time, we capture the screen activities on our computer screen, which in our case is this Promethean active board. And we use a suitable software for it. In our particular case, we use TechSmith's Camtasia Studio. As a result, we get a screen capture, a capture of this board content. And the screen capture does not contain the speaker. So, we need a final post-editing process where we combine both tracks in Camtasia Studio to receive the final result. If we look at the usage of our videos, well, there's virtually no limit to use them. Students have access to the content by means of a so-called e-learning unit, which contains the so-called virtual sessions from where they can access the videos directly, or they can use their phones, as in this scenario over here. Here are the phones, where they can watch the videos directly via YouTube. Well, but why YouTube? Many of my colleagues fiercely oppose to the use of video. I won't discuss their resistance here, which may be due to a general opposition to the use of videos in teaching, or that they simply do not like the idea of having to present themselves in public and can thus be freely evaluated. I think that video is a wonderful option for our students and that a platform such as YouTube is perfect for a variety of reasons. For example, uploading a video is dead easy. Within a very short time and by means of a few mouse clicks, one can add a video to an existing YouTube channel. And editing existing videos is also not a big issue. We are by no means perfect, and so editing has to be done quite often. And the editing function in YouTube allows us to add comments to erase mistakes and so on and so forth. A very suitable option for the creation and generation of video material. And then there are numerous analysis options which provide you with excellent insights into the use of your videos, from where are they used, when and how and so on and so forth. And with the option to group your videos into playlists, you can create full courses that contain the entire video material from the preliminaries via the e-lectures to the in-class activities. Apart from these functional aspects, there are various aspects that motivate you quite a lot.  Users can easily motivate you by means of appraisal or good marks, but they can also demotivate you by applying harsh criticism or by giving bad marks. So we prefer the first option, and in particular we can profit from the number of clicks, that is the actual viewers of the videos. In our case, about 160 videos after one year and 180,000 clicks. The number of likes and dislikes can be very motivating, where hopefully the number of likes is much larger than the number of dislikes. And most importantly, you can build your own community of followers, that is your subscribers. And after one year, we've had 1,600 subscribers. Beyond the generation of mere motivation, however, it is important for the users to leave behind comments to make proposals and to correct errors. This readily improves the quality of individual videos and of your channel as a whole. Many of the comments or questions are truly scientific, like the ones over here. Is the uvula an active or a passive articulator? What about inserting R between morphemes as in drawing? Is that received pronunciation? Now questions like these have to be answered with all scientific care. In some cases, questions may be more or less didactic in character, leading to explanations about our didactic and presentational concept. In both cases, we have to take great care in answering these questions in order to satisfy our customers. The videos, questions of the month, contain our answers to our community and our reaction towards this issue. Well, and then there are really motivating comments, which make you feel fantastic. But even those comments that do not praise your teaching talent can evoke interesting discussions that you would probably never get without opening your video channel to the public. For example, the debate about the origin of man as a consequence of our video, the evolution of language, is a good example of such a comment. The result was a discussion about the evolution of man. Finally, there are numerous flanking effects that we did not expect when we decided on using YouTube. After one year, we've had almost 1000 new community members on our e-education platform, the Virtual Linguistics Campus. And meanwhile, a considerable number of them have registered for our online classes. And furthermore, what is important for us, we have satisfied the expectations of our sponsors and have evoked a lot of media interest leading to an increase of our international reputation. So by and large, we are very glad to have taken all these decisions. We will not end up here. We will develop new video types. We will try to improve our presentation techniques. We will deliver more and more content by means of video. So we will be at your service and we will make mistakes. We are not perfect, but we are humans and humans make mistakes, but we will try our very best to avoid them. So as usual, at the end of such a video, I invite you to join us wherever possible. Share your ideas with us. Motivate us as well as you can so that this channel can remain what it has become one year after its start. Your Linguistics Video Platform. Thank you.