Hello, I'm a student Computer Science who unfortunately misses the kowledge and free time to really help with the Open Grapics project.
In reply to dsp Mind's email, last year we had a project where we were introduced to hardware programming in VHDL, so exactly the group a) users. However, I don't think that OGD is that interesting for that group, because it's too expensive ($250 or more?). We used Spartan-3 Starter Kit Xilinx Development Boards (http://tinyurl.com/4z7yk), and those are only $100. Of course OGD has much more ram, features and better FPGA, but even the starter kit was way overkill for what we did (playing with LEDs, switches, buttons and stepper motor, making a crude elevator simulator). So I would concentrate very much on group c) and d), the more serious users. As for the reasons why there aren't many successful open source h/w projects: Reason a) Is not totally true as stated above, but it is for hardware which can be put in a computer (e.g. PCI cards). I think the real reasons are that there is just much less expertice in hardware programming and the nature of hardware. Timothy's hate of Wishbone illustrates the first point. Though it works, it apparently isn't good enough. And when reading this mailinglist it becomes clear that designing hardware isn't as easy as software programming, a lot of experience seems to be needed to achieve something at all, while in software it's more like everyone can make whatever is wished, and it will always work, only how stable and ugly the code is differs. Software can be easily copied, hardware can't. So sharing hardware designs in a useful way is much harder in practice. But FPGAs can change that. It would be great if there was a cheap FPGA add-in card which can be easily (re-)programmed at runtime, something like OGD, but less expensive. Then people could write sort of FPGA code modules for those cards which can be used as sort of libraries by normal programs. Something like the early 3D cards, but then for programmable hardware. Progams could use those cards to accelerate certain things, like compression, encryption, de/encoding, or whatever else is the computational bottleneck in the application. If people could get such card easy and cheap enough (starting price $25-50) and it becomes popular, before you know there'll be a lot of people much more interested in hardware programming. The reason OGD can't be that card is because it's own hardware demands are too high to be cheap, and it is a videocard, so in general it's used all the time and can't be easily used for different things. Greetings, Indan P.S. Everything alright with the opengraphics.org Wiki? All content seems to be lost, and earlier today the site was down. _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
