diamondman

6 ms·

1.
by diamondman 7y ago
I found this attendant console in a thrift store in San Francisco for $4. It is covered with LEDs and buttons, and has a very high build quality. I thought about how hard it would be to make something similar today (with just the cost of LE
2.
Python library for 1990s AT&T Attendant Console(github.com)
6 points by diamondman 7y ago|1 comments
3.
by diamondman 11y ago
I disagree that it is trivial. If we know what bits of the unencrypted bitstream do what, and have a cryptographically secure way of signing the stream, then GLHF with that. If it turns out that documenting the parts of the chip required fo
4.
by diamondman 11y ago
This is an interesting story. An unfortunate end. Most of these things sound like short term issues that get resolved as the tools are made. Alternately Xilinx could have just put the docs out there and said they only support ISE. That way
5.
by diamondman 11y ago
'get to the level' of ISE... I disagree. I do not want to build an IDE. I want an open toolchain, the thing that the ISE interface calls. There is some math in there that takes certain skills to implement, but I know several peopl
6.
by diamondman 11y ago
This feels like circular logic to me. We do not want the hardware companies spending time 'open sourcing' their docs because they need to spend that time and money 'making more features' which they wouldn't have to
7.
by diamondman 11y ago
When you say 'good, efficient software' i wonder if you are talking about Xilinx ISE/Vivado, or any of the tools from their competitors. I can not imagine you are.
8.
by diamondman 11y ago
Note that Altera's compiler for Open CL does not let you run your OpenCl stuff faster. It is intended so you can write your FPGA programs (that run outside of your computer usually) in OpenCL. Most of the imagined benefits kind of vani
9.
by diamondman 11y ago
You have to change out a certain DLL for POST windows 8 in order to get ISE to behave and not crash randomly. YAY! Xilinx said they didn't care but somewhere on their support forum there is some kind soul who said what dll to rename (t
10.
by diamondman 11y ago
Companies seem to be terrified of trying anything. That is why I was happy when Sony put The Interview up on the internet and theaters for simultaneous release. No one would try that first, and since it worked ok for them it is now an optio
11.
by diamondman 11y ago
Those jobs also pay you to sell your ideas that you are never allowed to use again unless you continue working for the company you sold it to. And if you have the gall to use your own idea, lawyers!
12.
by diamondman 11y ago
Very well written. I had no idea some companies went so far as directly making their debugger the software key. That is intense but makes a lot of sense. In the case of the Xilinx Platform Cable I wrote firmware to, they have a CPLD that do
13.
by diamondman 11y ago
Amusingly the Xilinx license states that you are not allowed to use the bitstreams generated by their software in any device that they did not manufacture. This means if you implemented a xilinx fpga in an altera fpga, it would be against t
14.
by diamondman 11y ago
OP here I get there is a big difference between hardware and software, but I feel that certain parts of the gaps are closing. They will not CLOSE, but as they get closer we can learn from each other. With that said, to address your point: L
15.
by diamondman 11y ago
OP here This is a severe problem that saddens me greatly. For now I am just writing tools to make JTAG/SPI/etc loading of chips Ubiquitous to the developer writing software/netlists for them. I do not know enough about the pl
16.
by diamondman 11y ago
OpenCL support for FPGAs is super limited and only done through vendor specific tools. The point of these tools is more to LET you write your FPGA program that runs outside of a desktop computer in OpenCL than it is to make an FPGA be able
17.
by diamondman 11y ago
Sadly it is private. It is a channel for reverse engineering silicon devices. If you are interested and you hang out in IRC channels for microcontrollers, FPGAs, etc, and ask the right questions you may get an invite.
18.
by diamondman 11y ago
I get the idea you are aiming for, but this will not work. GPUs are vector processors. They are good at certain types of repetitive unrelated (parallel) math. They can be good at simulating physics since physics is described with matrix mat
19.
by diamondman 11y ago
In the future if my tool for loading the chips works and is adopted, I hope to define an interface for using FPGAs directly in the computer similar to how OpenCL defines an interface for GPUs. Hopefully I would not follow the shit show that
20.
by diamondman 11y ago
I am replying to this comment instead of the multiple people under it. You guys are right that FPGAs are not quite ready, or maybe will never be ready to be the primary radio for a phone because of the static power consumption. You could st
21.
by diamondman 11y ago
Oh god i never noticed that! Maybe it does not install when running the native linux ISE.
22.
by diamondman 11y ago
Haha, not at all. I do not take it as an attack or anything :). The UI is obvious. The inability to use most of the intermediate file formats for anything since they are secret formats is annoying. If I remember correctly it had dependencie
23.
by diamondman 11y ago
Several friends complain about the arcane nature of verilog and vhdl and like the idea of better languages written by actual language designers. But since the steps of FPGA compiling first converts the HDL language into a netlist which is u
24.
by diamondman 11y ago
OP here You are right that my particular project is not the biggest piece, but it is the part that pisses me off. I can deal with Xilinx's crappy compiler if I can program my chips with ease..... or maybe I should say UNTIL I can progr
25.
by diamondman 11y ago
OP here dominicgs had some good ideas since software defined radio is very powerful. One extreme example of something you could do with a reconfigurable radio signal processor in your machine is install things that the FCC would not let be
26.
by diamondman 11y ago
Hmm, that is a way I did not think about. Documenting hardware limitations for compilers gives competitors leverage for saying theirs is better because it does not suffer from X. I understand that open source is not particularly important t
27.
by diamondman 11y ago
I am sorry you suffer from the dongle collection woes too. The only reason I can see to buy expensive dongles are the ones that have a big blob of RAM on them for quickly reading debug output from the chip without slowing it down, and ones
28.
by diamondman 11y ago
I am OP astrodust: That is exactly the problem :). Turns out ISE (Xilinx's tool) has several command line tools that are run by the GUI in order, but the arguments are not documented. I was able to make a Makefile that did the ISE comp
29.
by diamondman 11y ago
I am OP Hmm, that is actually a good point. Might as well not draw any attention to yourself incase some ass hole has a patent on the concept of moving electrons down copper or something insane.
30.
by diamondman 11y ago
I am OP You are correct some of the information required to build a computer for these chips are 'internal' details. However they already have strict patents on most of it, and knowing the configuration bits of a chip and the the

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