The only place I’ve been able to find the Snickerdoodle Book is on Hackaday’s CDN: https://cdn.hackaday.io/files/7799333672416/snickerdoodle-book.pdf
It seems to have disappeared from everywhere else. Why is it no longer available on krtkl.com?
It turned out we didn’t have the internal resources to keep the “book” up to date with all the incremental software changes being made. We replaced (to a certain extent) the book’s contents with the krtkl wiki—which can be more practically maintained by the snickerdoodle community, although it seems to be more useful for spammers than actual contributors. We’ve also added more instructions to the images and we maintain our Github repos and website with the latest and greatest…to the best of our ability anyway.
Were there any specific resources/documents/guides you were looking for in the book that you haven’t been able to find?
-Cousins
Even if it is no longer completely accurate, the book still provides an excellent overview of everything that’s going on with the hardware, and to a lesser degree, the software. Without the book, I would have much difficulty discovering how everything fits together. I would ask that you put the book somewhere visible, maybe on the home page of the wiki, with a caveat that it is out of date and you do not plan on updating it. “This is here for references purposes only and is no longer up to date. We do not have the resources to keep it up to date.”
In general, the organization of the wiki is severely lacking, and as far as I can tell, it only has a fraction of what’s in the book. A home page that mirrors the table of contents of the book would be useful, even if many of the entries were annotated with “this information is not currently on the wiki”. That annotation may prompt others to fill it in. FYI, I am both a hobbyist and a professional. I have my own Snickerdoodle and I use them at my job.
The book does not answer all of these and could be clearer on many aspects, but here are specific questions I have:
- Everything I’ve seen relating to hardware is focused on how the board is made/works. What’s missing (from my perspective) is an explanation that focuses on the elements that I can control. I would like to see an explanation that glosses over how things are connected, the physical attributes, etc, and focuses on:
- Can I talk to the platform controller from the PS? From the PL?
- If I can, what can I do? Can I control the LEDs from it?
- Clearer instructions on the boot process. I didn’t realize the buttons could be used to change the boot mode until I read through the platform controller firmware.
- Clearer instructions on resetting. I accidentally discovered that I have to hold the reset button down for some number of seconds (until the app LED starts blinking rapidly) to reset the ZYNQ.
- What does the select button do? Can I use it in any way after boot or is it only a boot mode selector?
- The platform controller can switch between antennae. How do I make that happen? Why might I want to make that happen? Do wlan0 and wlan1 use the same antenna?
- Can the USB port be used in other modes than as a UART? Can I make it a HID?
- Can I change the default boot mode? Could I set up the board to QSPI boot by default?
- What, specifically, is the purpose of the platform controller? For example, if I wanted to make a custom platform controller, which features are necessary and which can I play with? How does it work? That code is not clearly documented. I have a very hard time understanding how the UART pass-through works.
- Which GitHub projects are relevant to making the system work? It took me a long time to find the scripts you use to build the Ubuntu image.
- How do you build that Ubuntu image? Which steps are necessary for hardware functionality, and which steps can I alter?
- I would like to set other parameters on boot, but I can’t figure out how, where, or by what config.txt is read.
- I would like to prevent the WAP from starting up, but I can’t figure that out. I specifically want the WAP to never start, so stopping it after boot is not my goal.
I created a Snickerdoodle Book page on the wiki, with the intention of copying what’s in the book into the wiki. Each page can be marked with a warning that the information may be out of date. That way, each page can be updated incrementally. Though I’m not promising I’ll be motivated enough to copy the whole book.
I would like to use MediaWiki templates such as Warning: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Template:Warning
Would you add Extension:ParserFunctions to the krtkl wiki? https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ParserFunctions
And maybe import some of the templates? I can create them manually, but importing would be far simpler. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Templates
ParserFunctions should have already been enabled, but I’ve upgraded the wiki and PF extension and updated our LocalSettings. I’m unsure which templates you are looking for?
I’ll address your other questions when I have some time this week.
Nevermind the templates. I’ll copy those over manually as I need them.
Regarding the book, we did have it posted on the documentation page for a while, but it was generating more confusion than clarity. However, we can always add it back if that’s what people want.
Agreed the wiki is lacking…that’s yet another item we’ve lacked the resources to build out, but in the sprit of open source/community building it’s something individuals can contribute to.
Regarding your platform controller questions, instead of going through these one by one, I will mention we just finished an internal project that addresses all these questions along with some outstanding performance issues we were having. I haven’t had time yet to publish the updates, but it does explicitly cover items like what the buttons do, boot options, PS-uC comms, etc. Pushing this out is high on my to-do list.
Our instructional resources and repos are frankly a mess… While we get those sorted out, if you’re looking for a place to start, I’d suggest checking out Dr. Kaputa’s snickerdoodle-based curriculum at http://www.ravvenlabs.com/cpet-563.html
Thanks a lot for giving the wiki a kick. If you’re open to contributing resources, projects, etc. (including posting stuff to sites like Hackster), I’d be happy to feature your content on our site and in our newsletters…as well as send some free hardware your way!
-Cousins
My current project is an internal tool for my employer, so I won’t be able to post that. Now that I’ve had time and reason to really dig into the ZYNQ and all of this, I’m excited about working on my own projects. Once I have a project worthy of attention, I’ll let you know 
Is someone working toward populating that “Snickerdoodle Book” wiki page that firelizzard created? If not, I’d be happy to take a first pass at it.
jasonnet, please do. I’m not sure when I’ll be getting back to Snickerdoodle work.
I’ve started to populate The Snickerdoodle Book at a new URL. (Firelizzard, I’m unable to edit the content at the original URL that you created. If you can still edit it, it would be great if you created a redirect to the new location.)
The new location is https://wiki.krtkl.com/index.php?title=The_Snickerdoodle_Book
Please feel free to work on it. I’m not planning to work on it again for few days.
I left it for future work to copy the text of later chapters in to the wiki. Similarly images and tables. So at this point, it’s just a start.
I did experiment with including images in Chapter 2. I hacked it so that the source text is not excessively verbose, yet each image still appears to have a caption and is rendered near where it is declared. How I did that is not very elegant. If someone would write a template, that would be a big help.
Thanks everyone. Enjoy.