Snickerdoodle board on FLOSS Weekly

I haven't watched the video since most of my computers don't have sound hooked up, so this comment may already be addressed in the video:

Snickerdoodle has a very impressive price for a Zynq board, but what's it doing on FLOSS weekly?  Don't you have to use the proprietary Xilinx Vivado software to program the Zynq FPGA?

The closed toolchain is not ideal, but this is pretty much an universal problem for FPGA design.

I think FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software) is still relevant if a FPGA based project like this is releasing HDL "source code".

I've not gotten clarification on yet on whether their board is Open Source Hardware.  I hope that they will release schematics, PCB layout and BOM.  Could you comment, rcousins?

<< but the GPU is a small part of BeagleBoard/Bone and many projects don't need it and can therefore be fully FLOSS.

>> And others do need it which makes it not FLOSS. Is this some kind of quantum FLOSS ? You make this argument

all the time and it still does not make sense. By the very definition there is no FLOSS when your SoC contains proprietary

hardware no matter how fine you try (and try, and try) to split that hair.

<< As I understand it, the Broadcom documentation doesn't really give you enough information to write your own operating system and you must reverse-engineer from the Linux source code and use a "binary blob" to boot the GPU.

>> BSD ? RISCOS ? There has also bee a port to an RTOS. I don't remember which RTOS but I was part of a

discussion about porting it in these forums and the person trying to do it made the same argument as you. After

pointing him to the Broadcom documentation he was able to complete the port. Your "understanding" needs updating.

>> Since the GPU documentation has been released, an assembler and disassembler have been made available

which allows anyone to disassemble the boot code. Since BSD, RISCOS, a couple of bare metal projects and

the RTOS port I spoke of earlier use the existing boot loader, I'm not sure why using the binary blob is such a

bad thing but it is nice to be able to produce an alternative.

<< OTOH, they do document the GPU but I haven't heard whether RasPi users have been successful writing their own GPU applications and integrating them into actual RasPis.

>> I have seen a couple of projects that do. Google it with "using raspberry pi GPU" and learn.

<< If the proprietary tools don't give you the correct result, you can't go into the source code and figure out why.

>> I probably couldn't figure it out even if I had the source code. High speed logic routing and optimization

of large FPGA designs is beyond my skill set and I would venture a guess that it is beyond yours and most

other peoples' in the business as well.

<< "Synthesizing an FPGA in an FPGA" can be useful, but as far as I can tell it makes terribly inefficient

use of silicon resources and you cannot get good performance. 

>> I'm not real big on this idea either for exactly the same reason.

<< I think my Flavia project Flavia: the Free Logic Array is a wonderful tool for teaching about programmable logic, since it's small and fast: you can recompile and download a small design in a second or two.  IMO that's awesome compared to the longueurs you face using proprietary tools -- assuming you have the patience to download them in the first place and get the license to work.  OTO FH,lavia is really only suitable for small projects.  You can do a much bigger project with a tiny Lattice iCE40-HX1K and IceStorm than you can do with Flavia and the much larger Xilinx Spartan-6 LX9.

>> As you say, the Vivado Design Suite is not a tool for teaching about programmable logic. It is a fully

professional tool for creating large, high speed logic designs. Comparing these two objectives and the

complexity of the tools needed are like comparing building and an Estes model rocket to a Saturn V. It

just doesn't work as a reasonable argument.

>> It took about 20 minutes to download the 6.9 GB VDS and another few minutes to download some other files.

Modern high speed Internet (mine is "only" 50 Mb/s although I have seen it hit, but not hold closer to 80 on

one or two occasions) is a wonderful thing. YMMV.

ARM and x86 silicon is not software.  It's hardware.  It's proprietary hardware and nobody expects ARM or x86 to become OSHW.

 

However, ARM and x86 silicon are a hardware platform that can be used for FLOSS (Free-as-in-Liberty Open-Source Software).  The ARM and x86 intruction sets are published, including both assembly language and their binary codings.  So as a programmer, you can write FLOSS that runs on those platforms and when you distribute source code your users have the option of modifying your source code for their own needs and recompiling it for their hardware.

 

In addition, you can write a compiler for any language you want and generate ARM or x86 machine language.  You are not dependent on the chip maker.  You are not required to use (for example) PL/M for the x86 machine or (as a silly example) APL for the ARM.  You buy the chip, the manufacturer tells you what the instruction bits do, and you can write whatever software you want.  You have freedom.

Again, this part has an ARM processor.

<< "Synthesizing an FPGA in an FPGA" can be useful, but as far as I can tell it makes terribly inefficient

use of silicon resources and you cannot get good performance.

 

>> I'm not real big on this idea either for exactly the same reason.

Neither am I, but it *is* possible...and you can make it as proprietary or open as you'd like. I can almost taste the freedom.

<< If the proprietary tools don't give you the correct result, you can't go into the source code and figure out why.

 

>> I probably couldn't figure it out even if I had the source code. High speed logic routing and optimization

of large FPGA designs is beyond my skill set and I would venture a guess that it is beyond yours and most

other peoples' in the business as well.

Indeed. Unfortunately this is a slightly different situation than messing something up and just doing a 'core dump' and starting over. If you decide you're more qualified than the chip/tool designers (and their 100s of thousands/millions of hours of experience and their army of engineers) to figure out what they've been doing wrong all this time and you start fiddling with the timing/optimization of these parts at the gate level, you're about 1,000x more likely to do something that's going to result in screwing something up so badly that the parts gets so hot that they melt solder and fall off the PCB than you are to find a better solution - regardless of the warm fuzzies you might experience along the way.

On the other hand, it would be kinda cool to see...

Ryan,

I know, I know. I checked it out first thing this morning !! Now the really hard part, waiting for March 2016.

"you need a full blown OS which implies many megabytes of code"

With regards to the Zynq specifically this is actually a completely false statement. The free Xilinx tools are designed to target Linux, FreeRTOS and *bare metal* and will include C driver files for any peripherals you use (like configuring the DDR at startup etc.).   You can go right ahead and write a 5 line program in main.c and load/execute it over JTAG just like a microcontroller and w/o any operating system.   This is totally supported by Xilinx and in fact is the way that most of the tutorials at http://zynqbook.com are done.    This is no suprise as you need to keep in mind that the very serious industries in which Zynq is used don't just care about slapping 10 million lines of buggy "off-the-shelf" code into a Linux powered multimedia appliance so they can make the next 8 week product cycle deadline.

So if you have a closed-source binary bitstream for the FPGA that implements a GPU/DSP/accelerator and you openly provide the instruction set that that closed HDL source accelerator executes (Which is also synthesized with a closed source FPGA toolchain).

Then all of a sudden that would be open-source?

Because that's precisely how most semiconductor IP is deployed --- like the ARM or GPU on your RPi/Arduino/BeagleBone

But magically they are more "open source" than Zynq?

Hi Jamil,

You may have a great product, but your last two comments are quite rude. You only quoted a portion of the sentence, it actually said

"in order to get it to do anything much (ie to make serious use of the processor) you need a full blown OS" and that is the case.

Who has the time to re-write the tens of thousands of lines of code that are present in rich Linux libraries to run bare-metal?

To make intensive use of an application processor in a practical amount of time, you do need the support of a full-blown OS.

With all the associated problems of having a team to manage the OS, packages and build.

It seems a team-wide issue. Your colleague (Ryan) was also rude on hackaday to makers in general when he said (quote):

""I am coming to the realization (maybe a little too late) that “makers” really aren’t interested in building anything beyond a LED-enabled garage door opener or an automated cat feeder."

If makers are your target market, then you and your team might want to be polite to potential customers.

Someone else on hackaday said to Ryan "You should really have a friendlier person handling your social media presence. I know you probably didn’t intend it, but you kinda came off as a xyz".

shabaz In reference to the partial conversation you quoted, I subsequently apologized to this person on Hackaday

<<Hi xxx and everyone – I apologize. I haven’t slept much recently…or in a long time. I haven’t had a decent meal in weeks. I haven’t seen a lot of my closest friends in months. I literally wake up and do nothing but work on this project all day every day 7 days a week. It’s not a hobby or a past time. It’s my life. Needless to say, it means a lot to me.

I don’t expect everyone to agree with what we’re doing or find it interesting or really care about us or our project for that matter. I do occasionally let my frustration get the better of me when I hear people badmouthing or second-guessing our intentions, our ability, our dedication, and, in some cases, our integrity. And for that, I am sorry.

We have put more of our time, bodies, and souls into this than most would consider reasonable or even humanly possible. We’ve been told – and continue to be told – it’s a bad idea and that we should give up and do something different/easier for more reasons and by more people than I can count.

Ultimately, if we can’t get anyone else to buy into the *vision* of what we’re proposing to provide, there’s really no one to blame but ourselves. And if that’s that case, it’s just something we’ll have to live with.

So again, my apologies for coming off as a **. My emotions got the better of me.>>

Not sure if you've ever been part of a crowdfunding campaign or a public product launch but to say it's a stressful time would be a severe understatement. I got caught up in the moment (after taking countless personal and professional bashings for a product we'd just released into the wild a few days prior). The moment passed and I have since had dozens of fruitful and civil conversations with the folks at Hackaday and the folks here at Element, like yourself. Only time will tell how the maker audience receives our product, but we certainly hope the initial dream when we started on this project - of making professional-caliber development tools more accessible and usable for makers, students, and hobbyists so that they may take their projects to the next level and directly contribute to the next generation of great technological advances - comes to fruition.

And I'd have to politely disagree with your statement that this was being misrepresented:

"in order to get it to do anything much (ie to make serious use of the processor) you need a full blown OS" and that is the case.

in the sense that these two statements: "in order to get it to do anything much" and "to make serious use of the processor" contradict each other (or, at the very least, one does not imply the other). Maybe to "make serious use of the processor" typically does involve a full-blown OS. But it's just not true that you need a full blown OS to "get it to do anything much." Unless I am misunderstanding what you are saying or you see it differently?

Hi Ryan,

I'm not going to comment any more on the rest, but regarding the OS issue, everyone's opinion on what 'serious use' (which is how the text 'do anything much' was qualified in the original text) means could vary. Serious use means different things to different people, as does doing anything much. I interpret serious use as "using modern protocols, application frameworks and software services which by nature entail using many of the building blocks of the built-in SoC". These would in a lot of cases entail the use of an OS such as Linux in practice. And in other peoples opinion serious use may not mean the same thing at all.

Basically, a body of engineers would agree, and a body of engineers may disagree, and

there is no harm in that.

Which is why it is odd for someone to say it is a "completely false statement" in bold

and italics on this point.

Fair enough, shabaz. Not trying to beat this into submission or anything but (formatting aside), I think you gotta admit that "do anything much" is a generalization - and, contextually or not, it is actually not true. I totally appreciate that this particular comment was being made from one individual's point of view. But there are thousands (or more) of application examples taking full advantage of  uPs yet are not running any sort of OS (i.e. bare metal).

Naturally every system is different and different approaches to the same problem can be equally valid.

Shabaz, I'm not out to hurt anyone's feelings here.  My comments were a bit sarcastic and hyperbolic for the sake of illustration but definitely not intended to be rude or hurtful. 

My interpretation was that the original writer was *complaining* about having to boot a full blown multi-megabyte OS and I was pointing out the the gratis Zynq toolchain heavily directly supports not doing this.

And my reference to "serious applications" wasn't intended to disparage makers but rather contrast the OS support demands of commercial industrial uses (like motor controls) with commercial consumer uses (like BluRay players).   I can assure you genuinely that the comment was not at all directed towards the maker community.

With regards to the second comment my entire point is that the snickerdoodle being held to a higher open-source standard than every other single board computer designed for this market simply because we have an FPGA.   That's not at all fair and equitable at all as noone is asking Broadcom to release the source code to the tools they used to synthesize the VideoCore IV or asking ARM or Intel to do the same for their synthesis tools.

So again I apologize if I hurt anyone's feelings but the original premise of this thread --- that somehow we aren't open-source/didn't deserve to be considered open-source/should have not been interviewed on FLOSS weekly when we are openly giving away a lot of material to the community that was very costly in real dollars $$$ and personal sacrifice to produce and much of which was funded out of own pockets did hurt my feelings.

Shabaz, I'm not out to hurt anyone's feelings here.  My comments were a bit sarcastic and hyperbolic for the sake of illustration but definitely not intended to be rude or hurtful. 

My interpretation was that the original writer was *complaining* about having to boot a full blown multi-megabyte OS and I was pointing out the the gratis Zynq toolchain heavily directly supports not doing this.

And my reference to "serious applications" wasn't intended to disparage makers but rather contrast the OS support demands of commercial industrial uses (like motor controls) with commercial consumer uses (like BluRay players).   I can assure you genuinely that the comment was not at all directed towards the maker community.

With regards to the second comment my entire point is that the snickerdoodle being held to a higher open-source standard than every other single board computer designed for this market simply because we have an FPGA.   That's not at all fair and equitable at all as noone is asking Broadcom to release the source code to the tools they used to synthesize the VideoCore IV or asking ARM or Intel to do the same for their synthesis tools.

So again I apologize if I hurt anyone's feelings but the original premise of this thread --- that somehow we aren't open-source/didn't deserve to be considered open-source/should have not been interviewed on FLOSS weekly when we are openly giving away a lot of material to the community that was very costly in real dollars $$$ and personal sacrifice to produce and much of which was funded out of own pockets did hurt my feelings.

My, but you guys have a serious attitude issue !!

I'm the original writer referred to here:

My interpretation was that the original writer was *complaining* about having to boot a full blown multi-megabyte OS and I was pointing out the the gratis Zynq toolchain heavily directly supports not doing this.

 

and I wrote in response to the suggestion that because your board only costs $55 it makes the Zynq cheap compared with simple FPGA s from Lattice.

I wasn't *complaining* - I was pointing out that there are applications where the Zynq and other similar SOC chips are not appropriate.

And with regard to the cost of the dual ARM application processors on the Zynq - what is the point of them if you don't use them - they cost silicon (ie money) power etc. And how much other stuff does your 5 line program drag into the system ?

And yet another point - the "gratis" tool chain  - is that like Free-as-in-Beer but with an overtone that we should damn well be grateful too !

If I use a stand alone processor I can CHOOSE the tool chain (which I think was part of the point JB was making).

Let's get this into perspective,

the Zynq is a nice chip for the applications that it fits, it's not the only FPGA SOC (Micro Semi and Altera have parts too), it's not the first (that was Atmel) and it isn't the answer to every FPGA user's prayer.

Your board may be quite nice too (I said that earlier)  - it's certainly cheap but if you want to prototype a mW power data logging system it's about a such use as bull in a china shop.

You need to lighten up a bit, fine to be proud of your work but don't oversell it, and don't be so pushy - other people have feelings (and brains) too.

MK

Michael Kellett wrote:

 

And yet another point - the "gratis" tool chain  - is that like Free-as-in-Beer but with an overtone that we should damn well be grateful too !

I'm grateful for Free Beer -- especially at the end of a long day at the Embedded Systems Conference or ARM TechCon

Michael Kellett wrote:

 

My, but you guys have a serious attitude issue !!

I'm not sure where you are drawing this assertion from but I believe I did a more than adequate job earlier of apologizing for how some readers may have interpreted the manner in which I presented the facts.

That said, I'm still going to stick to the technical facts as there is no other reason to participate in the technical forums.

Hopefully, a debate of the technical facts is possible without having disagreements degrade into personal attacks.

And yet another point - the "gratis" tool chain  - is that like Free-as-in-Beer but with an overtone that we should damn well be grateful too !

With regards to the term "gratis" I can reassure you there was no "overtone" as you put it demanding that you or others be grateful.

In fact the term "gratis" was a direct reference to how proprietary software that is provided at no charge is described by Richard Stallman himself.

See:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFMMXRoSxnA&feature=youtu.be&t=2m40s

Let's get this into perspective,

the Zynq is a nice chip for the applications that it fits, it's not the only FPGA SOC (Micro Semi and Altera have parts too), it's not the first (that was Atmel) and it isn't the answer to every FPGA user's prayer.

Your board may be quite nice too (I said that earlier)  - it's certainly cheap but if you want to prototype a mW power data logging system it's about a such use as bull in a china shop.

 

You need to lighten up a bit, fine to be proud of your work but don't oversell it, and don't be so pushy - other people have feelings (and brains) too.

Certainly understood, michaelkellett - all I was saying was 'hopefully $55 for ARM + wireless + >150 reconfigurable I/O (FPGA) falls into the category of low-cost.' Wasn't trying to imply that you need/should/have to use it. We understand as well as anybody that this isn't for everybody or every application. Just trying to bring what has traditionally been extremely expensive and complicated capabilities to an audience that otherwise wouldn't have access to/the ability to use it so that they may create the kinds of things that having these capabilities enables them to create. That's all.

We try to go out of our way to engage with the community as much as possible to answer questions and clarify things. Would I rather meet everyone here in person? Of course - and I go to as many in-person events to talk with as many folks like yourself as possible. But we want to provide support or knowledge or whatever it may be in whatever form that might take whenever possible. This typically leads to dynamic, thought-provoking discussion about all kinds of topics, but if people would prefer that we leave the forum for whatever reason, just let me know.

No  - don't go - this is one of the most interesting threads on E14 in while !

I just told myself to get on with some work until I saw that bit on your post.

Re: Software/Hardware  - it seems to me that there is quite a big blurry bit in the middle - to me it's definitely hardware when you get thinking about registers and clock cycles and software when you write apps that run anywhere. But I write mainly very low level software where I'm interacting very closely with the hardware so it might be C but it's close to the metal. Ashenden is right that good use of  HDLs requires software skills but I suppose there is a corollary that says that to do good software work near the boundary you need hardware skills.

MK