Statistics: November 2012

Paul Boddie paul at boddie.org.uk
Tue Dec 4 18:46:20 EST 2012


On Tuesday 04 December 2012 23:17:51 Werner Almesberger wrote:
> Paul Boddie wrote:
> > Well, I think there's an obvious direct correspondence between enthusiasm
> > for concrete future developments and the list traffic such enthusiasm
> > generates.
>
> Yes, we have basically the following project "threads":
>
> - Ben NanoNote software: the system/distribution is still being
>   actively maintained, mainly by Xiangfu, but there's little
>   visible activity otherwise.

I want to spend more time on Emdebian, but then I want to spend more time on 
everything!

>   Perhaps that's also a sign that the platform has matured. E.g.,
>   I use my Bens quite a lot to help with developing DIY circuits
>   (combined with UBB, they make great in-circuit programmers or
>   in-circuit testers), but all these uses are project-specific.

I am also tempted to look at the UBB, although I imagine that I'd need some 
kind of cable that works with the pin/contact layout and "breaks it out" to 
individual connections somehow, because I doubt that I have the soldering 
skills to solder individual wires onto the different pins.

Actually, I did wonder whether the USB port could be driven in an 
unconventional way similar to the way one sees things like cameras using such 
a port to provide composite video output. I suppose the Ingenic documentation 
and source code confirms or denies such a possibility, but I have to ask 
because this would also be an interesting interfacing option if in any way 
possible, and I'm sure someone must have asked about it before.

> - NanoNote successor: we talked a lot about making a possible
>   successor but nothing concrete has happened in this direction.
>   One of the main problems is of course the lack of money to fund
>   such development.

I've started to gather references to this and other things on the Wiki because 
it seems difficult to know what happened in the past if one wasn't there or 
only dropped in very infrequently.

>   Past Qi-Hardware developments were financed by participants,
>   mainly Wolfgang, but these pockets are pretty empty these days.
>   If someone feels up to setting up a major crowdfunding project
>   that finances R&D and production, that may be an option. A few
>   warnings, though:
>
>   - it's probably hard to convince people to pay for R&D since
>     a) the outcome is uncertain and b) it'll take a while until
>     there will be tangible results.

I wouldn't say that I bought the NanoNote without any ideas for its use, but 
one reason I did buy one was definitely to support the initiative and to gain 
expertise that could potentially help the initiative along. Unfortunately, we 
live in an age where most people just want stuff served up to them and don't 
care how it gets made or how it arrives as long as it does. But I would like 
to think that people can be genuinely engaged in multiple ways and that these 
in combination can make interesting and rewarding things happen, much more 
than just getting people's money and their involvement ending when the 
transaction ends.

>   - in addition to volunteers, you'll need 3-5 people who can
>     work full-time (with plenty of overtime) on this, including
>     occasional travel to external suppliers and fabs.

We're definitely seeing some people trying the above, particularly those 
arm-netbook people but also the KDE tablet people, and it makes me wonder how 
widely the experience is being shared between these groups or whether they're 
learning the same things the hard way.

>   - you'll need to raise a substantial amount of money. If
>     things go very smoothly, such a project would need probably
>     at least 3 months for design (with partial prototypes) and
>     sourcing, then another 3 months spent on making and testing
>     prototypes and preparing for production.
>
>     Each prototype run will have external costs in the order of
>     at least USD 5-10 k(PCB and SMT cost, components, shipping,
>     etc.)

I wonder if this doesn't constitute the beginnings of a guide to open hardware 
project planning. ;-)

>   - it may be hard to agree on a feature set. Perhaps projects
>     like PengPod (a Linux-friendly tablet, but AFAIK not Open
>     Hardware) are helping us there, because they already satisfy
>     some of the need for tablets, narrowing the range of potential
>     device categories.

The big problem of initiatives like these is that they risk the KDE tablet 
experience of aiming for a target that they think is stationary but is in 
fact moving.

> - Milkymist One R3: while there seems little enough left to do on
>   the hardware side (all that went into Milkymist One R4, see
>   below), and development of the "VJ station" software has come to
>   a halt, there are two follow-on activities that are still alive:
>
>   - the MMU, headed by Yann: this is advancing slowly but steadily,
>     with the expectation that we'll have a solid basis for Linux at
>     some point. Practical value of this will be limited, given the
>     overall state of the platform, but that won't diminish the
>     value of the learning and perhaps teaching experience.
>
>   - improved SoC architecture, including a much faster memory
>     interface, headed by Sebastien: this seems to be in a working
>     state but includes the burning of some bridges. I.e., it may be
>     a good basis for the Linux port (which should in general be
>     agnostic to how the SoC is implemented), but since not all the
>     functional blocks used for the VJ application have been ported
>     to this new Migen-based system, there is no trivial migration
>     path for existing uses.

As I told the OpenRISC people, I also really want to get into FPGAs and 
CPU/system architectures, but I think I need to get into it gradually, and 
maybe one thing someone might try and do is to offer suggestions to people 
like me about relatively easy ways to get started, which boards to consider 
buying, and which toolchains have the least obnoxious licensing.

> - Milkymist One R4: this would be the next revision of the
>   Milkymist hardware, with fixes from R3, and several
>   improvementes. This is more or less at a point where we could
>   consider a prototype run, but since there is very little prospect
>   of being able to commercialize future Milkymist hardware, making
>   boards would be nothing but a very expensive extravaganza.
>
> - the Milkymist experience has spawned two projects that focus on
>   specific details. One is Sebastien's Migen, which is sort of a
>   build system that generates "smart glue" to interconnect pieces
>   of Verilog, and the other is Wolfgang's fpgatools, which aim to
>   end the Age of Darkness surrounding FPGA synthesis.
>
>   Both projects are quite active but have their main audience ouside
>   the Qi-Hardware community (in the case of Migen) or are still
>   pretty much a "lone wolf" activity (in the case of the fpgatools).
>
>   Neither aims to lead directly to the production of large
>   quantities of hardware at the moment.

I think some of the problems being faced is getting people "to the front", 
or "to the coalface" if one prefers a less militaristic but probably more 
parochial term. This problem is, of course, everywhere in technology, but 
while it can be straightforward for skilled developers to learn new libraries 
or frameworks, hardware imposes additional restrictions that reduce the 
traffic to the places where people are useful.

> - I have a few small projects that experiment with LEDs, among them
>   "antorcha", a wand with 32 LEDs that can display text or images
>   when waved back and forth rapidly, and "tornado" (under
>   development), a similar but more advanced line of 64 LEDs that
>   should also display things when whirled at the end of a chain.
>   I made these specifically for protest marches.

These sound like a lot of fun.

>   There's also the "LED Toy", a smaller and more streamlined device
>   with only 24 LEDs that's intended for left-right symmetric images.
>
>   Some of these projects could be turned into products, but again,
>   they'd need some R&D and production setup budget to get there.
>
> - there's a bunch of ancillary projects (eda-tools, cae-tools,
>   kicad-libs, ben-wpan, etc.) that move in little leaps from time to
>   time, e.g., when new features are needed, when bugs are found, or
>   to track changes in their environment.
>
> Did I forget anything ?

I don't know. :-) But this is a nice summary reminiscent of the newsletters 
that appeared to stop last year, so it's a welcome overview of interesting 
things that demand closer attention... and more of those scarce time 
resources. ;-)

Thanks for sharing!

Paul




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