👥 3 conferences
🎤 4 talks
📅 Years active: 2016 to 2019
No biography available.
3 known conferences
This talk will present a historical narrative of the background behind how the NeTV + Milkymist inspire the HDMI2USB then helped the NeTV2 projects and how they all became interlinked through events like Congress! From the study of this history, we will attempt to distill a few core lessons learned that can hopefully be applied to other open hardware projects.
Open hardware projects tend to evolve differently from open software projects. Even though it’s very easy to fork an open software project, pull requests and merges help ensure the main branch of a project continues to improve. Furthermore, open software projects tend to evolve along with their tools, as evidenced by the concurrent maturation of Servo and Rust, or Linux and Git. In contrast, open hardware projects tend to fork and then fracture the community as they gain commercial success and go closed, as evidenced in the evolution of the 3D printer and drone communities. There are also few examples of hardware projects that co-evolve with their tools.
The evolution of the NeTV + Milkymist to the HDMI2USB to the NeTV2, along with the concurrent maturation and adoption of the Migen and LiteX ecosystem, is one of these rare examples.
This talk will present a historical narrative of the background behind each of these projects and how they became interlinked. From the study of this history, we will attempt to distill a few core lessons learned that can hopefully be applied to other open hardware projects.
One important lesson is that open anything takes time and patience, and so the project itself needs to be in a space where it can move at an appropriate pace to grow a healthy community while maintaining relevance against potentially better-funded closed-source options.
Another lesson is the importance of crowdfunding as a mechanism to marshall community around a given release, as opposed to relying upon sources of financing that expect direct returns on investment (such as venture capital or loans).
A final example of a lesson we will discuss is the importance of picking the right tools to co-evolve with the project. While many open source options alternatives exist to closed-source tools, it’s problematic if the design tools somehow limit the hardware implementation or introduces flaws in the design itself -- and hardware, unlike software, cannot be patched. Migen/LiteX are front-end tooling for describing FPGA designs (“gateware”), and their output being a bitstream means it can be in the hardware space while enjoying the privilege of easy patching and updates. Furthermore, Migen/LiteX offer critical features and performance metrics unavailable in the closed-source alternatives, meaning that these are not simply design tools, they are also core to enabling the competitiveness of the hardware itself.
The SymbiFlow project aims to be the "GCC of FPGAs" - a fully open source toolchain supporting multiple FPGAs from multiple different vendors. FPGAs have been around since 1980s but most have previously require getting giant closed source proprietary black boxes from the FPGA vendor (10 gigabytes or more!). Thanks to SymbiFlow this is no longer the case!
Like the previous IceStorm efforts, SymbiFlow includes both documentation of FPGA bitstreams and a workingtoolchain for compiling Verilog into these bitstreams. Unlike previous efforts, this new toolchain supports industry standard timing driven place, and route and significantly larger designs. This makes SymbiFlow a big change over the previous Project IceStorm effort and enables support for large, modern FPGAs that can be used for things like high resolution video and many gigabit networking.
This presentation will give you an update on the current status of the project. What currently works, the future roadmap and how you can help with the project and how to expand the number of supported FPGAs even further.
Currently SymbiFlow is supporting the Lattice iCE40 plus two modern, capable and popular FPGAs architectures - the Lattice ECP5 and Xilinx 7 Series. The project has also gone to an effort to provide a well documented process for understanding FPGA bitstreams. This provides a clear pathway for new contributors to extend the tooling to support even more FPGAs!
Come find out about how a small group are changing the world of FPGA development!
Due to their reconfigurable nature, FPGAs make hardware problems into software problems and enable anyone to building custom integrated circuits. This means you could create your ideal microcontroller, not what some manufacturer thinks you want. You can have the exact right set of peripherals including as many SPI, I2C or CAN as you want!
Previously developing for FPGAs has require getting giant closed source proprietary black boxes from the FPGA vendor (10 gigabytes or more!). This has strongly hampered their adoption and reduced them to niche use cases. However, with the ending of Moore's law and things like RISC-V, FPGAs have a strong role to play in enabling open source communities to participate in the explosion of new hardware design. They also enable us to apply the high speed of innovation and security we expect from an open source software.
Tim 'mithro' Ansell is the founder of TimVideos.He is known for having to many projects including hardware like the HDMI2USB.tv, I'm Tomu and many more! Through this frustration with FPGA toolchains while developing these projects he ended up being heavily involved with the development of the SymbiFlow project.
The TimVideos.us group aims to make it easy for anyone to create high quality recordings of conferences and user groups. To achieve this goal we have developed the HDMI2USB.tv project, an FPGA based, fully open (hardware and firmware) solution for capturing HDMI video signals. The solution has been in use since late 2015 and used at numerous conferences such as Linux.conf.au, DebConf and many PyCon conferences around the world.
To be truly FOSS has however meant developing code for doing HDMI receiving and sending. Come hear about all the issues we have run into and the nitty gritty details about how it works (or doesn't!). By the end of the talk you will know more than you ever wanted to about the HDMI protocol!
This talk will cover:
All code and materials and hardware covered in this talk are released under OSI approved licenses.