heathjohns

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by heathjohns 10y ago
Project: A webapp for teaching people FPGAs from the ground up: https://www.blinklight.io Problem: Right now I'm looking for a hardware partner to manufacture the accompanying "dev board"
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by heathjohns 10y ago
Thank you, fixed!
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by heathjohns 10y ago
Author here, that is precisely the point of Blinklight (the site this blog post is from) :) It starts from the absolute beginning, and the tools and tutorials are web-based and integrated with each other: https://www.blinklight.i
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by heathjohns 10y ago
Author here - have a look at the main site, it was made just for that purpose: https://www.blinklight.io It's based around the iCE40/IceStorm, but it has its own specific "dev board". I'm planning on ma
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by heathjohns 10y ago
The trouble with "golden" chips is a) the manufacturer can EOL it at any time (and I don't think just the OSS people are numerous enough to keep any specific set in production), and b) it freezes things in time. For things t
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by heathjohns 10y ago
Things have been changing - they put FPGAs in phones now: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Samsung+Galaxy+S5+Teardown/2... (search for "FPGA" in the page). That's a tiny one, granted, but things are
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by heathjohns 10y ago
> The problem is that many aspiring learners want to approach it like a software problem. That is precisely why I made Blinklight - it's an educational platform for starting at the very bottom.
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by heathjohns 10y ago
I don't disagree. I'm reasonably optimistic that current and near-future FPGAs are overkill enough for the job of motherboard chipset and basic peripherals that that some basic portability abstractions can be put in place (e.g. A
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by heathjohns 10y ago
Author here - I'm advocating the latter. I agree with you to a point. However, I believe that those things that have been with us for decades: sound cards, 2D graphics adaptors, network cards, etc. can be done in FPGAs, and should be.
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Open Source Needs FPGAs; FPGAs Need an On-Ramp(blinklight.io)
309 points by heathjohns 10y ago|147 comments
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by heathjohns 10y ago
I don't disagree at all. There might be some gains to be had from stacking things high in 3D (reducing the physical distances a little). And there's clearly some room for improvement on the compute power per watt front, but even
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by heathjohns 10y ago
Moore's law (as it is generally talked about) is actually a pretty good indication of how much computational power we can get from a single processor core. That, combined with Amdahl's law, means that the unmistakable levelling of
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by heathjohns 10y ago
It's going to be a very interesting space, IMO. The thing about FPGAs is that they are deeply dependant on storage technology. Right now their gate configuration is kept in SRAM loaded in at boot, which is the worst of all worlds. No