Milkymist OneA video synthesizer at the forefront of open source hardware

S. Bourdeauducq

Milkymist project

August 2011

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What is open source hardware?

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Openly licensed development kits from chip makers?

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Beagleboard (TI)

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mbed (ARM)

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In fact nothing really new...

They sell (proprietary) chips.

They always have been happy to see you copy their “referencedesigns”.

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Community-developed devices for hobbyists?

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Arduino

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RepRap

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Grassroots movement

More potential for open innovation

But...

Niche markets

Small volumes

Hackers are cheap

Low price implies low technology

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Open source practice for developing “industry-grade” hardware?

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Openmoko

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Milkymist One

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A video synthesizer for...

VJs who want low latency, cutting edge interactive effects.

Clubs and concert venues who can use it like a nice “lightingeffect”.

Small music bands who want plug and play VJing.

(Hackers who want to play with advanced digital technology.)

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Those are niche markets and “small” volumes too, but...

Milkymist One is better and cheaper than existing devices.

which sold in the order of 40000 unitspublicity is of utmost importance (We sold 40 so far)

Competitive even in small volumes.

We can afford cutting edge technology.

Milkymist One is one of the first commercially available embeddeddevices with open source CPU

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Milkymist One in more detail

Milkymist One is a product containing a FPGA as centralcomponent.

The FPGA implements the Milkymist System-on-Chip (SoC)comprised of a CPU, I/O interfaces and accelerators.

The Flickernoise video synthesis software runs on the SoC.

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Milkymist One: everything on board for interactive installations

Video input

VGA output (1280x1024)

DMX512

MIDI

Line audio and built-in microphone

Ethernet (OSC, Twitter wall, updates, TODO: streaming...)

Infrared

USB

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Milkymist SoC: an advanced open source system-on-chip

LatticeMico32 32-bit RISC CPU core

High performance DDR SDRAM controller

All I/O peripherals for Milkymist One

2D texturing acceleration

Floating point vertex shader

Wishbone, FML and CSR interconnect

Extensive use of on-chip DMA

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Flickernoise VJ software: flexibility and ease of use

Effects (called “patches”) are fully programmable

Using the Flickernoise Patching (FNP) language

Graphical user interface on Milkymist One

Automatically share patches between Milkymist devices online

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Why open source hardware?

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JTAG/Serial debugger for Milkymist One (Yanjun Luo, Michael Walle)

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Linux port to the Milkymist platform (Takeshi Matsuya, Lars-PeterClausen, Michael Walle)

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OpenWrt port (Lars-Peter Clausen)

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LLVM back-end (JP Bonn)

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Parts of the RTEMS port to the Milkymist platform (Yann Sionneau)

RTEMS is a light POSIX real-time operating system

Ported during Google Summer of Code 2010

Now flashed on production devices

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On-chip GDB server (Michael Walle)

Debug embedded software on Milkymist One with GDB

As if it were running on your local PC

stack tracebreakpointssingle steppingevaluationsetc.

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QEMU emulation support for Milkymist hardware (Michael Walle)

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Distribution maintainers, please make our life easier:PACKAGE QEMU-SYSTEM-LM32!

It’s part of the recently released QEMU 0.15. If you are very nice, alsopackage qemu-user-lm32.

THANKS!

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Collaborative hardware debugging (Michael Walle, Werner Almesberger)

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Case design (Joachim Steiger / Raumfahrtagentur)

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Manufacturing (Sharism at Work Ltd: Wolfgang Spraul, Xiangfu Liu,Adam Wang, Yi Zhang)

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Re-uses of Milkymist technology for scientific research

NASA CoNNeCT experiment

Software defined radioMilkymist SoC’s SDRAM controllerScheduled for launch in January 2012Will be put on board the ISS

GSI/CERN particle accelerator control systems

On-chip GDB serverIn developmentwww.ohwr.org

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[your awesome hack here]

IRC: #milkymist on Freenode

Mailing list: devel@lists.milkymist.org

Web: http://www.milkymist.org

Twitter: @milkymistvj – Github: milkymist

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