Glasgow: Scots Army Knife for Electronics | Hacker News Reader

Glasgow: Scots Army Knife for Electronics

github.com

167 pointstonyg27 comments

For the moment you have to build it yourself if you want one. I know that Esden on 1Bitsquared is working on productivizing it, but it's still a work in progress.

I actually bought all the stuff I need to build one, but I just didn't get the time to assemble it. And I'm a bit scared of the BGA package that is used o the Lattice FPGA.

And if you want to know when you can buy it, you can sign up for notifications here: https://www.crowdsupply.com/1bitsquared/glasgow

(sidenote for those not familiar with crowdsupply: it is a crowdfunding platform, but specialized in electronics hardware and a lot stricter in vetting projects than Kickstarter)

How much were the parts?

I bought a batch of other stuff besides it, but the BOM goes @60 EUR for a board, I think, but my memory might be playing tricks on me.

And the PCB's I ordered off JLCPCB for @25-30 EUR for 10 pieces.

Also, the Lattice iCE40 FPGA's you _have_ to get off of Digikey, since they're the only ones that stock them and sell them in reasonably low numbers.

First a Haskell compiler and now this. My hometown is doing OK.

Also the train to Edinburgh <ducks>..

Glasgow is smiles better, everyone knows it

It has nothing to do with Glasgow the city other than being named after it.

I asked whitequark about the name; it's named Glasgow because it's where the headquarters of FTDI are based, and the initial prototypes were intended to be an open-source serial adapter gateware before feature creep set in.

And a coma scale! Which is a better town association than the Bristol stool scale.

If we're doing scales I'd have started with Kelvin :)

Would highly recommend coding on Buckfast!

Looks like a new and improved JTAGulator (https://github.com/grandideastudio/jtagulator/blob/master/JT...)

I want one!

I have a very basic version of something like this called a Bus Pirate, based off of a PIC. Unfortunately the Bus Pirate is more or less a dead project. I also have a Saleae logic analyzer which is a fantastic tool, but only reads data.

The Glasgow is a huge upgrade to the Bus Pirate! Most of the time I don't really need too much capability when experimenting with a new sensor or peripheral but I am sure the Glasgow will come in handy in development.

I hadn’t heard of nMigen before. It is great to hear of new stuff in the HDL language space.

nMigen is pretty cool and capable. I can only recommend these Youtube series, where nMigen is used to build a full 6800 CPU: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85ZCTuekjGA&list=PLEeZWGE3Pw...

This seems super cool! I participated in a USB sniffer kickstarter some years ago called the open vizsla which had problems and was eventually mostly delivered.

This project seems like that on steroids. Kind of like a fancy digital scope without the scope but with all the cool protocol decoding.

My understanding Open Viszla kind of died when Bushing died. I think he was the brain behind it. But some people involved in Open Viszla were involved here as well. Marcan was involved in the hw side form what I know.

The title on HN at this time is "Glasgow: Scots Army Knife for Electronics".

Is this suppose to be Swiss Army Knife? Or is there some kind of thing where they wanted to call it Glasgow and so then had to invent a new corruption on the Swiss army knife analogy to make it Scottish?

I'm picturing the tiny knife they keep in their socks when they're wearing their kilts.

That’s the Sgian-dubh. If you wondered what it was called

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sgian-dubh

Traditionally used for handling the heaters in Scottish army ration packs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ry4QBQejFU

Wenger and Victorinox have a sweet racket on army knives. The one the army buys for each recruit doesn't have a corkscrew, so they know they'll always sell a second one (bought with private funds) which does.

The corkscrew is important because, being the army, Kirsch is of course streng verboten: https://www.srf.ch/play/tv/archivperlen/video/fondue-in-der-...

Edit: Caucasians had been doing "ballet for little boys" years before John Woo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-df9ujMa54

In the days before silverware was part of a table place setting, "alternation" of males and females at a meal wasn't just polite, but ensured no one was too far away from a knife.

I'd imagine it's a riff on Swiss Army Knife? It seems deliberate given 'Glasgow'.

It is an odd choice - there hasn't been anything like a 'Scots Army' for a very long time.

As taneq says, it's presumably a joke on the Glasgow theme.

Scottish regiment knife doesn't have the same ring to it.

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