Hi,
Is anyone interested in developing FOSS firmware for FPGAs? If so, I have a whole bunch of FPGA development boards with me at DebConf for people to play with. I have roughly 5-6 boards of different shapes and sizes with both Xilinx and Altera boards. Should we set up a hacking area to get some stuff done?
Getting started with FPGAs can be quite daunting because a lot of the stuff is still "in the stone age" but I'm happy to help people get through the hurdles. Sadly, at the moment FPGA development does require the use of proprietary tools but there are some smart people working on solving that problem -
http://hackaday.com/2015/07/28/open-source-fpga-toolchain-builds-cpu/.
My main interest in developing FOSS firmware for FPGAs is to develop fully open source video capture hardware for live streaming of user groups and FOSS conferences like DebConf (the main reason I'm here at DebConf is to chat with your video team). The project is called the
hdmi2usb.tv and is part of a larger video capturing project called TimVideos (see
code.timvideos.us).
Looking forward to doing some coding with you all!
Tim 'mithro' Ansell
@mithro on Twitter