Re: PilMCU status

[Alexander Williams]

Geo, definitely if you have spare time between job searching, I want to try
it :D

I live in Kamakura (near the beach) and have a couple iCE40 8K dev FPGA
boards (
http://www.latticesemi.com/en/Products/DevelopmentBoardsAndKits/iCE40HX8KBreakoutBoard.aspx)
if you want to borrow one to test.

It also has a fully open source synthesis toolchain (reverse engineered
bitstream) - http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/ - which is great compared
with Xilinx/Altera licensing.

In any case, your board is really great work and definitely has a lot of
potential.

You can email me here:


http://www.google.com/recaptcha/mailhide/d?k=01yPoiXxXt6Yjq7D9aF2oJJg===W3CYLO5kNNqFW-xuPJfEMSowC6hKyD1vQZgSGtvw3mU=

Thanks,


AW

Re: PilMCU status

[George Orais]

Hi Kuba, Christopher and AW! 

Sorry but let me reply you all in just one post. 


> Hi Geo, 

Hey Kuba! 


> Wow, this is so cool, we all thought you went completely missing but it seems 
> you’ve been putting a ton of work into this, including a whole PCB 
> “motherboard” (I remember your original prototype was simply using an Altera 
> dev board). 

Thanks! Wow you have a great memory! Yes that was indeed my first plan but I 
decided to build a custom board so that I can choose my prefered components to 
also help me ease up the Verilog coding. 
The Altera dev board was using SDRAM which is a bit trivial especially if not 
using the NIOS II softcore. But if using NIOS II it will defeat the purpose of 
running PicoLisp VM in bare metal. 
But later on I can port PilMCU to other FPGA boards but let me polish all the 
remaining tasks first ;) 


> I haven’t finished watching the video but gotten up to 20 minute mark where 
> you typed (+ 1 2 3 4 5) - so the machine works. 

Oh! Thanks for watching! Sorry to have a long video, I'm just not fluent with 
English and have to pause often due to the unexpected interuptions like the 
auto-focus.. but I hope everyone had fun watching the video until the end :) 


> Awesome job! 

Thank you! But still need to improve some areas as well as the missing I/O 
ports need to be done, but its already in progress. 




> Hi, this looks very cool. I'm very impressed. A few questions: 

Hi Christopher! Thanks! 


> 1) When do you start crowdfunding so we can preorder? 

Actually I would love to have it as soon as now but let me polish some areas 
first. 
We need someone who is more incline in diealing with such transactions like the 
Kickstarter or Indigogo? I remember someone voluntered on this matter because 
me and Alex are not so into business related stuff :) I think it was Jakob 
Eriksson? 
Also to consider is we need to finalize what we want to have on this board to 
have a smaller and compact board. I already have version 2 in mind but I would 
like to hear from everyone interested what they want to expect on final board. 


> 2) Is this (or will this be) an open hardware project? 

Yes it should be open hardware project because PicoLisp itself is open source. 


> 3) Are there PilMCU codes to be released in some repo or tarball? 

It will be in tarball which is the usual way of Alex. I also can post it on 
github but let me polish things first. 
But please note that the PilMCU codes that will be release is the PicoLisp 
part, Verilog codes will not be exposed because it's anyway not the code that 
you need to develop with. 


> 4) From what I understood one of the arguments against having arrays in 
> PicoLisp is that you would be expected to use arrays in a C library and 
> use them through FFI. Do I conclude correctly then that there would be 
> no access to arrays on a PilMCU system? 

Alex already answered this question on another thread but if you ask me, yes 
because PilMCU is standard PicoLips environment. 
And PicoLisp uses list data structure as the main option for arrays. 




> Hi Geo, 

Hi AW! 


> This is so amazing!! Thank you so much for the video. 

Thank you too for watching!! 


> I think others will likely ask, but is this going to be licensed openly? 
> hardware designs etc open sourced on GitHub? 

As i mentioned in above, yes this is licensed openly. The hardware schematic is 
open but for the PCB layout, it was done by my Chinese coleague but anyway the 
schematic drawing is already enough to be used as reference. 
For the code, the PicoLisp codes will be available via tarballs or github 
(depend to Alex) but for the Verilog part, I plan not to expose it because 
anyway it is not the code that you need to develop with. 


> How quickly can you make more of these boards? I'm currently also living in 
> Japan and would love to get my hands on one ;) 

Oh! Where in Japan are you currenlty located? Maybe we can meet and let you try 
the actual board. Unfortunately it depends how fast we could have the 
crowdfunding. 
I still got some spare PCB boards but I dont advise to use that to build more 
boards because it still got some schematic and PCB design issues. 
The fastest way to play with PilMCU would be using PilOS or as in an emulator. 
Another alternative is to port PilMCU to be used in other off the shelves FPGA 
dev kits but this will be a bit time consuming. 
But lets see how it goes maybe we could have the crowdfunding soon this year :) 
It would be nice to have these boards produced here in Japan... 




Again, thanks everyone for watching. As of the moment there is only one board 
but once we can accomplish one of the goals which is to have it mass produced, 
it will be fun to develop some device drivers using PicoLisp codes. 


But if you are eager to try PilMCU, either I can let you access the board 
remotely or you can draft your codes using PilOS and I will paste it here on my 
side to test your codes. 


Actually there is also an 

Re: PilMCU status

[Alexander Williams]

Hi Geo,

This is so amazing!! Thank you so much for the video.

I think others will likely ask, but is this going to be licensed openly?
hardware designs etc open sourced on GitHub?

How quickly can you make more of these boards? I'm currently also living in
Japan and would love to get my hands on one ;)

Cheers,


AW

> On Apr 12, 2017, at 5:45 PM, George Orais  wrote:
> >
> > Hi List!
> >
> >
> > At last here is the link for the demo video of PilMCU in action!
> >
> > https://youtu.be/mMgIvITAMBc
> >
> > I hope you will enjoy the show :)
> >
> > Again, my special thanks to Alex for his great idea and support on this
> project.
> >
> > Let's see how it goes and will keep you all posted.
> >
> >
> > BR,
> > Geo
> > --
> > UNSUBSCRIBE: mailto:picolisp@software-lab.de?subject=Unsubscribe
>

Re: Arrays

[Alexander Burger]

On Thu, Apr 13, 2017 at 09:51:14AM -0700, Lindsay John Lawrence wrote:
> The 'lack' of arrays has been a non-issue in picolisp for me so far. I've

For me too. Perhaps we should also point to

   https://picolisp.com/wiki/?arrayabstinence

Also,

> 4) From what I understood one of the arguments against having arrays in
> PicoLisp is that you would be expected to use arrays in a C library and
> use them through FFI.

the equivalent of writing a C library in normal PicoLisp would be doing it in
PilAsm -> Verilog in PilMCU.

♪♫ Alex
-- 
UNSUBSCRIBE: mailto:picolisp@software-lab.de?subject=Unsubscribe

Arrays

[Lindsay John Lawrence]

The 'lack' of arrays has been a non-issue in picolisp for me so far. I've
been generating and manipulating some pretty substantial bitmaps using
notation like this.

2-D Array:
(setq *Img (make (do Size (link (need Size 0)

Write:
(let (Bit (rand 0 1))
   (for Pt *Plot
  (set (nth *Img (cadr Pt) (car Pt)) Bit)))

Read:
(make
   (for Pt *Plot
  (link (car (nth *Img (cadr Pt) (car Pt))


Being just lists, it is trivial to slice n dice, nest them, embed
additional structures/lists at given data points, serialize, etc..

/Lindsay

Re: PilMCU status

[Christopher Howard]

Hi, this looks very cool. I'm very impressed. A few questions:

1) When do you start crowdfunding so we can preorder?

2) Is this (or will this be) an open hardware project?

3) Are there PilMCU codes to be released in some repo or tarball?

4) From what I understood one of the arguments against having arrays in
PicoLisp is that you would be expected to use arrays in a C library and
use them through FFI. Do I conclude correctly then that there would be
no access to arrays on a PilMCU system?

On 04/13/2017 06:15 AM, Kuba Tyszko wrote:
> Hi Geo,
> 
> Wow, this is so cool, we all thought you went completely missing but it seems 
> you’ve been putting a ton of work into this, including a whole PCB 
> “motherboard” (I remember your original prototype was simply using an Altera 
> dev board).
> 
> I haven’t finished watching the video but gotten up to 20 minute mark where 
> you typed (+ 1 2 3 4 5) - so the machine works.
> 
> Awesome job!
> 
> Thanks
> 
>> On Apr 12, 2017, at 5:45 PM, George Orais  wrote:
>>
>> Hi List!
>>
>>
>> At last here is the link for the demo video of PilMCU in action!
>>
>> https://youtu.be/mMgIvITAMBc
>>
>> I hope you will enjoy the show :)
>>
>> Again, my special thanks to Alex for his great idea and support on this 
>> project.
>>
>> Let's see how it goes and will keep you all posted.
>>
>>
>> BR,
>> Geo
>> -- 
>> UNSUBSCRIBE: mailto:picolisp@software-lab.de?subject=Unsubscribe
> 

-- 
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Re: PilMCU status

[Kuba Tyszko]

Hi Geo,

Wow, this is so cool, we all thought you went completely missing but it seems 
you’ve been putting a ton of work into this, including a whole PCB 
“motherboard” (I remember your original prototype was simply using an Altera 
dev board).

I haven’t finished watching the video but gotten up to 20 minute mark where you 
typed (+ 1 2 3 4 5) - so the machine works.

Awesome job!

Thanks

> On Apr 12, 2017, at 5:45 PM, George Orais  wrote:
> 
> Hi List!
> 
> 
> At last here is the link for the demo video of PilMCU in action!
> 
> https://youtu.be/mMgIvITAMBc
> 
> I hope you will enjoy the show :)
> 
> Again, my special thanks to Alex for his great idea and support on this 
> project.
> 
> Let's see how it goes and will keep you all posted.
> 
> 
> BR,
> Geo
> -- 
> UNSUBSCRIBE: mailto:picolisp@software-lab.de?subject=Unsubscribe

--
UNSUBSCRIBE: mailto:picolisp@software-lab.de?subject=Unsubscribe