Hacker News Reader

Comment by poseid | Hacker News Reader

Hm.. as hardware becomes a commodity, I don't think that custom designs can beat the commodity price point. What would be helpful, more web/interactive kind of tools to make hardware better accessible. For example, simple power calculators, that would compare the power consumption of an Arduino with special low-power devices. Or, how a 5V system compares to a 3V or 1.2V.

View on HN

The economics all depends on volumes, of course.

right, and volumens again depend on joining the right hardware platforms/alliances, at least for current semiconductor companies.

but what would be really interesting would be to see open-source hardware development, similar to a Linux kernel

exactly, and there are some open-source hardware designs (on sites like OpenCores), but the problem is that with existing hardware description languages very few people are able to reuse and contribute to these. This is why we've created the Cx language, to make it easier to design hardware for developers, and not just hardware designers.

We've open sourced the compiler; and we've designed some open-source hardware in Cx, see for example our Ethernet MAC: https://github.com/synflow/ethernet-mac

interesting how you generate blocks from the language: http://cx-lang.org/documentation/structure - I guess visual feedback would make the language attractive to non-HW designers. I gave a small talk once on sharing HW projects in the browser: https://speakerdeck.com/mulderp/sharing-hardware-with-javasc... - of course this is a different level, but still, having web/svg kinds of HW representations would be interesting. I guess for HW, good representations of schematics/waveforms are at least as important as he actual HDL, but I might be wrong.

Just to clarify, the diagrams on that page are actually made with Synplify from the generated HDL. As a matter of fact, I agree with you, and we do think that visualization is important. In our tool we have two views: if you're in a task, we show its state machine (kind of required since the input is structured code); and if you're in a network, we show a block diagram. This is how I made the pipeline in another post there: https://blog.synflow.com/hardware-acceleration/

No waveform yet because of limited manpower, but this is on the TODO list :-)

There are serious obstacles to this. The "freedom to redistribute copies" and "freedom to modify" aspects of Free software really don't translate well to hardware. There is unavoidable work and cost associated with copying a board, and much more associated with copying an ASIC (modified or otherwise). It's simply not going to be within the reach of the average user in the forseeable future.

What you might get is crowdfunded hardware, but that requires reasonable demands from the target market.

See this discussion http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/61873/why-is-...

good points. maybe it is more about datasheets, examples, demo's, kits, ... that suits to open sharing. Not for nothing TI is becoming a major open-source contributor. Same for Atmel via Arduino.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com