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

Most popular 'hardware' language. lots of stuff on opencores efabless

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

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