nMigen, A refreshed Python toolbox for building complex digital hardware is a project that whitequark has been working on for the last couple of years and I’m really liking the new improve syntax and the fact that it interfaces directly to Yosys.

There seems a lot of interesting things happening in the nMigen ecosystem;

• Lambda Concept has built an 32-bit RISC-V soft processor called Minerva. The CPU core currently implements the RISC-V RV32IM instruction set, is pipelined on 6 stages and largely inspired by the LatticeMico32 processor.
• Robert Baruch has a multipart series where he uses nMigen — a Python toolbox — to recreate a 6800 CPU like the one used in many vintage video games and pinball machines.
• Kate Temkin is also working on creating a new USB 2.0 protocol stack in nMigen for the LUNA: a USB multitool (& nMigen library). I believe that she is also hoping to work on a USB 3.0 stack using the ECP5 high speed transceivers by rewriting the Daisho core and the work that Enjoy Digital did to make a transceivers adapter.

However, a couple of the keys I have are auto generated, with the key being loaded directly into ssh-agent and never written to a file on disk. For hopefully obvious reasons, you can’t dump a private key back out of the agent, but it turns out that IdentityFile only needs the public key which you can get.

I ended up using the following script to dump the public keys to files;

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# Dump the public keys
for KEY in $(ssh-add -l | sed -e's/[^ ]\+ [^ ]\+ \([^ ]\+\) .*/\1/'); do
  if echo $KEY | grep -q '^/'; then
    continue
  fi
  export KEY_FILE="$HOME/.ssh/agent.$(echo $KEY | sed -e's/[^A-Za-z0-9]/_/g').pub"
  echo "Saving $KEY into $KEY_FILE"
  ssh-add -L | grep $KEY > $KEY_FILE
done

Then I added the following to the ssh_config

IdentitiesOnly true
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/agent.keyname.pub


When running with “ssh -vv” I see the following in the output;

debug2: set_newkeys: mode 1
debug1: SSH2_MSG_NEWKEYS sent
debug1: expecting SSH2_MSG_NEWKEYS
debug2: set_newkeys: mode 0
debug1: SSH2_MSG_NEWKEYS received
debug1: SSH2_MSG_SERVICE_REQUEST sent
debug2: service_accept: ssh-userauth
debug1: SSH2_MSG_SERVICE_ACCEPT received
debug2: key: /home/tansell/.ssh/agent.keyb.pub (0x2257da0), explicit
debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey,password
debug1: Next authentication method: publickey
debug1: Offering ECDSA public key: //home/tansell/.ssh/agent.keyb.pub
debug2: we sent a publickey packet, wait for reply


TimVideos.us and Google Summer of Code 2016!

The TimVideos.us project is happy to announce that it has been selected to participate in the Google Summer of Code for 2016 (GSoC). GSoC is a program where students are paid to contribute to selected open source projects over the northern hemisphere summer, flip bits not burgers!

The application period is now open and students have until 25 March 19:00 UTC to apply to work with the TimVideos.us project. The list of proposal ideas includes contributing to the HDMI2USB and things related to the Numato Opsis.

Due to the focus on hardware, we are very interested in students who are interested in things like VHDL/Verilog and other HDLs, embedded C programming and operating systems and electronic circuit/PCB design. Some possible ideas include;

• Working on USB 3.0 support for ultra high speed video capture.
• Porting a real operating system such as Linux or RTEMS to our SoC to allow easier development of new features.
• Making use of the Ethernet interface for connecting multiple devices together and alternative capture interfaces.
• Creating new expansion board and supporting the professional SDI standard.
• and many, many more.

If you are interested in applying, your first point of call should be our Google Summer of Code page. Even if you can’t apply to GSoC, you can also help us by forwarding this message to anyone you might think who is interested!

TimVideos.us 2016 New Year’s Resolutions

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Hello everyone,

Hope everyone has had an awesome start to 2016 so far. As is tradition in many western countries, I thought I would put together some New Year’s Resolutions and reflect on our progress in 2015. I guess more business minded people might call it a “project roadmap” 🙂

TimVideos Project

In 2015, I decided to focus the TimVideos project on the HDMI2USB project. The three key results of this focus were;

• Starting and completing a rewrite of the HDMI2USB firmware based on the Migen and MiSoC system developed by M-Labs.
• Launching a successful crowdfunding campaign for Numato Opsis, our first open hardware for the HDMI2USB firmware.
• Having the HDMI2USB firmware on Atlys boards used in production by multiple people!
  • Carl Karsten from NextDayVideo in the US for both PyCon ZA and Nodevember.
  • The DebConf Video team for their MiniDebConf in November.
  • Myself for recording my own talks on the HDMI2USB project at user groups here in Sydney!

With the success of this focus in 2015, the TimVideos project is going to continue to focus on theHDMI2USB project for 2016 (and I’ll go into more detailed goals shortly).

The TimVideos project has also been mildly successful in collaborating with other open source groups doing things related to video recording and production. In 2016, I hope we can strengthen these bonds and forge new ones. Some specific goals around this include;

• Getting the TimVideos project to join Software Freedom Conservancy (or similar organisation).
• Figure out the right way to collaborate with the C3VOC team on voctomix and start adding missing features from gst-switch allowing that project to be retired.
• Continue to work with supporting groups like NextDayVideo, the DebConf Video team and Linux Australia.
• Support and help Mike “Hamster” Field continue to develop a fully open source DisplayPort core.
• Collaborate with the apertus° project on high end (4k and greater!) video capture and processing.

HDMI2USB Project

As we are concentrating on the HDMI2USB project, we have some specific goals around that.

HDMI2USB firmware goals;

• Refactor the HDMI core to allow support a wider range of interfaces, better debugging and addition of more features. A document about the refactor has been started here.
• Add support for the high-speed GTP transceivers and Mike “Hamster” Field open source DisplayPort core.
• Get Ethernet support working (on both the Atlys and Opsis boards). The two major Ethernet features are;
  • Ethernet supports identical capture and control feature set to the USB port.
  • Allowing HDMI2USB boards to act has “HDMI over Ethernet extenders”.
• Support for more hardware;
  • miniSpartan6+
  • Digilent Nexys Video
  • New HDMI2USB designed hardware!
• Stretch Goals (1)
  • Add support for hardware based mixing.
  • Have either a RTOS or Linux running on the FPGA softcore.

HDMI2USB hardware goals;

• (By end of year) Development of a low cost PCI-Express capture card.
• (By middle 2017) Development of an Opsis V2 based around either an high end Artix-7 or a low end Kintex-7 FPGA.

(1): Stretch goals are things we plan to try and achieve if things go well.

Hope this update give you an idea of what we have planned for 2016! We would love your help making it all possible.

Tim ‘mithro’ Ansell

HDMI2USB “Production Board” Version 2

At the end of last year, we decided to abandon our first attempt and start again from scratch, this picture is the result of that work. Some of the reasons we decided to start from scratch was;

• A “de facto standard” for locking HDMI ports was established and low cost connectors became available. This meant we no longer needed to support both DVI and HDMI connectors, reducing the complexity significantly and solving some persistent issues.
• Not only did the cost of Spartan 6 parts with high speed “GTP” transceivers drop but our understanding of how to use them increased. This would allow us to create a board which natively supports DisplayPort.
• The idea streaming via not only USB, but also Ethernet became a stronger possibility, meaning the extra cost of adding ethernet was now worth it.

Overall, our board has the following differences with the Atlys board;

• Has DDR3 memory instead of DDR2, increasing the memory bandwidth.
• Has a Spartan S6LX45T with the GTP broken out to DisplayPort headers.
• Has a PCI-Express style expansion connector instead of the expensive VHDCI connector, allow much cheaper expansion boards.
• Has all the extra pins on the FX2, increasing the potential USB interface options.
• Has control over all the HDMI functionality, including hot plug and CEC functionality.
• Removes parts we don’t need such as the audio, buttons, switches and LEDs.
• Mounts in any ITX style computer case.
• Adds UTMI USB (as well as the Cypress FX2)
• Adds MicroSD connector.

• Setup xob‘s hacked up colormake in our build system. Nice colorized output now!

• Fought more with

  ERROR:Place - Constraint Resolved NO placeable site for hdmiMatri_Comp/dvi_rx1/ioclk_buf issue

• Watched Paul Fenwick’s OSCon Keynote.

Streaming System Hacking

• Made the configuration system better and adding a lot of comments to the json file (which isn’t really valid json any more).
• Made pycon2internal.py slightly better and able to parse PyOhio format (based on the PyCon US format).
• Added hack to make event2internal.py to use pycon2internal.py at some periods.
• Set up a bunch of encoders in the Oregon EC2 region.
• Get access to www.timvideos.us again and deployed the updated website.

26th July 2014

• Went into the Adelaide Hackerspace and created a cable to interface the USB3300 ULPI chip to 2xPMOD headers.
• Got streaming working for day 1 of PyOhio, it was late as we were disorganised.
• aps-sids foolishly pointed out a bug in the title of the streaming system, so I taught him about how we actually flumotion for an event.

 27th July 2014

• Did a lot of spreadsheet hacking on the production board pin planning spreadsheet;
  • Added half bank / BUFIO2 regions.
  • Added dedicated clock pin information.
• Started work on reshuffling the pins to fix the timing issue.
• Helped aps-sids get Flumotion working on the latest Twisted release. Turned out that someone else had already done most of the work and only a couple very small fixes where needed. aps-sids reported that he was now able to run flumotion on Ubuntu Trusty!

• Able to successfully load libFPGALink firmware onto Cypress chip and programmed the FPGA using it. Yay!
• Wrote a test firmware based on http://hamsterworks.co.nz/mediawiki/index.php/DVI-D_Serdes to transmit 720p output from both the TX ports.
  • Images are successfully received on both devices but there is a weird artifact in the image.

• Rohit’s VGA expansion board was received, but yet to turn it on. Looking forward to seeing that working live!

• Set up the streaming system for Carl and PyOhio
  • Tried to figure out where www.timvideos.us was hosted.

Jul 23 16:40:29 laptop udevd[841]: unknown key 'SYSFS{idVendor}' in /etc/udev/rules.d/xusbdfwu.rules:2
Jul 23 16:40:29 laptop udevd[841]: invalid rule '/etc/udev/rules.d/xusbdfwu.rules:2'
Jul 23 16:46:11 laptop udevd[841]: unknown key 'SYSFS{idVendor}' in /etc/udev/rules.d/xusbdfwu.rules:3
Jul 23 16:46:11 laptop udevd[841]: invalid rule '/etc/udev/rules.d/xusbdfwu.rules:3'

• This was fixed with;
  • Changing SYSFS to ATTRS
  • Changing BUS to SUBSYSTEM
  • Changing $TEMPNODE to $tempnode
• The little status light then turned on red! Yay!
• Was able to do a boundary scan in iMPACT on a Zybo development board after soldering a header onto it.

• Received the HDMI2USB production boards created by Numato!
  • Started with bunch of stuff to do with LEDs;
    • Logged issues about LEDs not been label intelligently. Such as the “power” LED being labeled “D33”.
    • Researched the DONE net again so I could understand the D2 LED (which should be named D_FPGA_NOT_CONFIGURED or DNCFG for short). Started adding the information to the JTAG/Reset documentation.
    • Figured out why D3 (connected to the Cypress INT1 pin) was only faintly lit.
  • Logged a bunch of issue regarding small silk screen fixes to make future boards easier to understand.
  • Logged an issue about adding some standoffs in the center of the board for mechanical stability.
  • Logged an issue about having a good GND point to connect your probe too.
    • This page describes the two good ways to add a GND test point – http://www.robotroom.com/PCB-Layout-Tips.html
  • Starting researching the 5V rail and if we could remove it totally (thus saving a bunch of stuff). Looks like we can, but needs more investigation.
  • After replacing the JTAG cable was able to use iMPACT to boundary scan and it found Spartan 6 chip!
• Discovered CEC is 3V3 signal.

Non HDMI2USB stuff

• Tried to figure out why my home router has decided that it wants to hand out address in the 2001:44b8:31dc:8d01::/64 rather than the 2001:44b8:31dc:8d00::/64 range it use too.
• Found a bunch of issues with domains served of ns1.mithis.com as the secondary servers where disabled. Root cause was an old version of PowerDNS failing on TCP zone transfers causing domains to become stale and get dropped from the secondaries. Enabled email notification when secondary disables the zones.

• Answered a bunch of work emails.
• Read and answered bunch of PyCon AU related emails.
• Fix DLV records for a bunch of domains.
• Helped aps-sids with flumotion porting work.

HDMI2USB related stuff

• Worked from Joel’s house today to receive the production HDMI2USB boards, they didn’t turn up 🙁
• Create a trusty VM on server for Joel to setup HDMI2USB CI on.
• Investigated origin of files in HDMI2USB code. Current status seems to be;
  • hdl/edid – Written by us (Jahanzeb).
  • hdl/hdmi – Mostly written by Xilinx and released in application notes. Need to figure out the exact licensing of the files (are they MIT? Only for use on Xilinx parts?) and move them to third party.
  • hdl/jpeg_encoder – OpenCores mkjpeg core. Need to move to third party.
  • hdl/usb – Written by us (Jahanzeb).
  • ipcore_dir – Cores generated by Xilinx. Need to figure out the exact licensing of the files (are they MIT? Only for use on Xilinx parts?) and move them to third party.
  • cypress – Confusing mess. We know this and plan to rewrite the firmware using only FOSS tools.
    • Bunch of proprietary binary blobs.
    • Bunch of headers of unknown copyright.
    • Bunch of code written by us.
• Logged a lot of bugs about warnings Xilinx tools are generating when compiling the firmware.
• Made generate_ucf.py generate a file for Atlys functionally identical to existing HDMI2USB.ucf file. Was able to successfully build the firmware with generate HDMI2USB.ucf file for the Atlys board.
• Started trying to get firmware to compile with the Numato HDMI2USB.ucf file, ran into the following issue

Phase 4.2 Initial Placement for Architecture Specific Features
ERROR:Place - ConstraintResolved NO placeable site for
 hdmiMatri_Comp/dvi_rx1/ioclk_buf

ERROR:Place - SIO has over-constrained componet hdmiMatri_Comp/dvi_rx1/ioclk_buf
 to have to placeable sites. Constraints come from driver constraints AND load
 IO constraints
/bin/sh: line 16: 28981 Segmentation fault (core dumped) map -filter "../ise/iseconfig/filter.filter" -intstyle ise -p xc6slx45-csg324-3 -w -logic_opt off -ol high -xe n -t 1 -xt 0 -register_duplication off -r 4 -global_opt off -mt off -ir off -pr b -lc off -power off -o hdmi2usb_map.ncd hdmi2usb.ngd hdmi2usb.pcf
make: *** [map] Error 139

• Rohit GSoC mentoring;
  • Emailed Rohit about reimbursement for VGA Board hardware parts.
  • Rohit has shipped me a board which should arrive at Joel’s tomorrow.
  • Weekly mentoring meeting.
  • Reviewed Rohit’s weekly summary blog post.
  • Reviewed Rohit’s VGA board V2 schematic.
  • Reviewed Rohit’s VGA board V2 PCB.