Month: March 2020

Scott Shawcroft Is Programming Game Boys With CircuitPython

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Some people like to do things the hard way. Maybe they drive a manual transmission, or they bust out the wire wrap tool instead of a soldering iron, or they code in assembly to stay close to the machine. Doing things the hard way certainly has its merits, and we are not here to argue about that. Scott Shawcroft — project lead for CircuitPython — on the other hand, makes a great case for doing things the easy way in his talk at the 2019 Hackaday Superconference.

In fact, he proved how easy it is right off the bat. There he stood at the podium, presenting in front of a room full of people, poised at an unfamiliar laptop with only the stock text editor. Yet with a single keystroke and a file save operation, Scott was able make the LEDs on his Adafruit Edge Badge — one of the other pieces of hackable hardware in the Supercon swag bag — go from off to battery-draining bright.

via Scott Shawcroft Is Programming Game Boys With CircuitPython — Hackaday

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Open Hardware Summit: Open down to the transistor!

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https___cdn.evbuc.com_images_65381743_37620015542_1_original (1)The 10th Open Hardware Summit will be on March 13th in New York City.  I am looking forward to this talk from Tim ‘mithro’ Ansell:

Open down to the transistor! A new revolution in open IC creation

With the slowing of Moore’s Law and the success of the RISC-V ISA there has been a renewed interest in developing truly open integrated circuits (IC). Tim ‘mithro’ Ansell has spent the last 2 years working at Google trying to remove roadblocks and enable the future to be open all the way down to the transistor.

Come find out about how a modern integrated circuit is developed including what software tooling and manufacturing data is needed to build them. The talk will include a background on existing resources, information on both the new DARPA programs enabling new tooling and the new resources Google has released (including a new open source PDK), and finally initial details about a program to help enable everyone (academics, hobbyists and companies) to create integrated circuits that are open down to the transistor!

Be sure to buy tickets before they are sold out!

speakers

Here is the exciting schedule:

Screenshot from 2020-02-17 20-31-51Screenshot from 2020-02-17 20-31-58

 

Open Hardware Summit: Open down to the transistor!

Watch Linux Boot On Your Hackaday Superconference Badge

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Last year’s Hackaday Superconference badge was an electronic tour de force, packing an ECP5 FPGA shoehorned into a Game Boy-like form factor and shipping with a RISC-V core installed that together gave an almost infinite badge hacking potential. It did not however run Linux, and that’s something [Greg Davill] has addressed, as he’s not only running Linux on his badge, but also a framebuffer that allows him to use the badge screen as the Linux terminal screen. Finally you can watch Linux boot on your Superconference badge itself, rather than over its serial port.

He’s achieved this by changing essentially everything: from the new VexRiscv CPU core, to new video drivers and a VGA terminal courtesy of Frank Buss, now part of the LiteVideo project. It’s not quite a fully fledged Linux powerhouse yet, but you can find it in a GitHub repository should you have a mind to try it yourself. Paging back through his Twitter feed reveals the effort he’s put into this work over the last few months, and shows that it’s been no easy task.

For those keeping score at home, this is an open hardware design, running an open CPU core, with community-designed open-source peripherals, compiled by an open-source toolchain, running an open-source operating system. And it’s simply a fantastic demo for the badge, showing off how flexible the entire system is. One of the best parts of writing for Hackaday is that our community is capable of a huge breadth of amazing pieces of work, and this is an exemplar of that energy. We can’t wait to see what Greg and any other readers tempted to try it will come up with.

If you’d like to refresh your memory over the 2019 Supercon badge, here’s our write-up at the time.

via Watch Linux Boot On Your Hackaday Superconference Badge — Hackaday

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