Collaborate Disseminate
Here’s an unusual concept: a computer-guided mechanical neural network (video, embedded below.) Why would one want a mechanical neural network? It’s essentially a tool to explore what it would take …read more Continue reading Physical Neural Network Can Be Trained Like a Digital One
The iCE40 series of FPGAs gets a fair bit of coverage on these pages, largely due to its accessibility (thanks to huge efforts in reverse engineering and open tool chains) …read more Continue reading iCEBlaster: A Drag’n’Drop Bitstream Loader For iCE40
Digi-Key have been producing YouTube videos for a number of years now, and if you weren’t aware, they’re definitely worthy of some viewing time. The playlist we’re highlighting here is …read more Continue reading FPGA Starter Videos To Help Soften That Learning Curve
To be honest, we originally considered throwing [Zachary Tong]’s experiments with ultralight metallic microlattices into the “Fail of the Week” bucket. But after watching the video below for a second time, it’s just not fair to call this a fail, so maybe we’ll come up with a new category — …read more
Continue reading Printing, Plating, and Baking Makes DIY Microlattices Possible
Yesterday we reported that Lattice Semiconductor had inserted a clause that restricted the reverse engineering of bitstreams produced by their FPGA toolchains. Although not explicitly stated, it’s assumed that this was directed toward several projects over the past five years that have created fully open source toolchains by reverse engineering …read more
Continue reading Lattice Drops EULA Clause Forbidding FPGA Bitstream Reverse Engineering
The topic of reverse engineering is highly contentious at best when it comes to software and hardware development. Ever since the configuration protocol (bitstream) for Lattice Semiconductor’s iCE40 FPGAs was published in 2015 through reverse engineering efforts, there has been a silent war between proponents of open bitstream protocols and …read more
Tim [Mithro] Ansell has a lot to tell you about the current state of open FPGA tooling: 115 slides in 25 minutes if you’re counting. His SymbiFlow project aims to be the GCC of FPGA toolchains: cross-platform, multi-platform, completely free, and all-encompassing. That means that it’s an umbrella framework for …read more
Continue reading Mithro Runs Down Open Source FPGA Toolchains
Our friend [Hunter Scott] gave a talk at a past Supercon about created phased array antennas. He mentioned he was looking for collaborators to create an antenna with the SiBeam SB9210 chip. This is a specialized chip for WirelessHD, a more or less failed video streaming protocol, and it’s essentially …read more
“RISC architecture is going to change everything”, which is why [SHAOS] is building this cool RISC-V DIY retro-style computer.
The project took inspiration from another hacker’s work in building a RISC-V emulator; shared in the Hackaday FPGA chat. He took it a bit further and got it going on an …read more
Anyone who’s ever had the pleasure of programming FPGAs knows that it’s a land of proprietary tools that almost require marriage level commitment to a specific platform to be effective. Symbiflow hopes to solve this by becoming the GCC of FPGAs.
Rather than a tool built around a specific chip …read more