Open Source Hardware:
Hacking Silicon for Fun
(instead of profit)
Or, How to fix your orbital farm robot
Troy Benjegerdes, Latchup-2024, Cambridge, MA
Soybeans
Corn
Silicon
Troy, 2017, with soybeans at Systems We Love
Soybeans, Corn, Oats, Rye:
- Farming off and on since 1985
Solar cars: 1995, Iowa State
Silicon:
- First email with MKK - 2012
Solar tractor: 2020
Soy, Oats, Rye - 1:30
Corn - Hybrid seed
Silicon
Self Replicating
$Billions
Where's my reprap (or self-repairing tractor)
I can grow soybeans, oats, and rye in soil, and save the seeds. Corn makes PLA, and I can print parts for a 3-D printer to print a bigger printer to make a mold to replace the broken part in my tractor to plant more corn to grow more PLA
Still needs a CPU
Both the tractor and the printer need a processor. I don't have a spare $30 million to buy the local silicon foundry (fab).
But some fabs might have idle production capacity open source toolchains
This is real, 7 years later......
If you code it,
will you fab it?
If you code it,
will they fab it?
Hardware is just code, at least at the beginning
- Verilog
- VHDL
- SystemC
- Chisel
- SpinalHDL
- <all the new stuff from Latchup 2024 that I can't fit on this slide>
NodeJS for hardware?
Hardware is inherently parallel and asynchronous... It might work.
Crazier things have been done, and gone viral, with low-enough barriers to entry.
Verilog for seriousity
This slide did not age well...
If you would have told me about Chisel, BlueSpec, or Haskell I would have said that's even crazier than NodeJS
Tools
- QFlow
- Yosys
- Magic VLSI
- icarus verilog
- SPICE
- KiCAD
Business
Ecosystems
- Antmicro
- Arduino
- Beaglebone
- BeagleV-fire
- Raspberry Pi
- Efabless
- 7elements *plug*
- Crowdsupply
- OpenCompute
- < add yours here >
Open source IN SPACE
# wget http://www.gaisler.com/products/grlib/grlib-gpl-1.5.0-b4164.tar.gz
# tar zxvf grlib-gpl-1.5.0-b4164.tar.gz
# cd grlib-gpl-1.5.0-b4164
# make ??? # hrrm, time to fork, needs a new target
Biological Intelligence prompts from 2012
Hybrid Intelligence prompts for 2024
- 20KM tall steel buildings with
space launch capability - Open source GPUS
- Infiniband-FPGA
- Building-integrated compute
- 16GB RAM, open source silicon, less expensive than a trendy farm-to-table regenerative steak dinner
- Pay your rent developing AGPLv3 hardware
If we are going to be a multi-planetary species, do we really want to call earth for replacement parts?
If you do have to make that call, make sure there's at least one farmers co-op space elevator in your supply chain.
troy-latchup@7el.us
Latchup '24: Open Source Hardware: Hacking Silicon for fun instead of profit
By Troy Benjegerdes
