We want to thank all the open source enthusiasts who attended the Wroclaw Open Source Meetup #8 on Wednesday, January 29th. We were pleased to have so many attendees, many of whom wanted to learn more about the topics around the presentations as well as other Antmicro technologies. We hope that you enjoyed talking tech with us as much as we did.
Our talks
For those of you who couldn't attend the event, we have prepared a short summary of the talks and a photo report to give you an idea of what the event felt like.
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“Testing open source USB IP cores with Python” by Rafal Kapuscik, Software Engineer at Antmicro
USB is often a daunting topic for developers, as implementing support for it from scratch is a complex task. When the goal of the project is more than a simple USB-to-serial bridge, it is a good idea to either use a hardware transceiver or, especially for older USB standards, use an open source core to implement a USB core directly in the FPGA fabric. But which one to use? Despite the availability of a number of different USB IP cores, there was a need for a unified test suite that would run each core through the same set of scenarios, providing a direct, apples-to-apples comparison of their behavior. To solve this issue Antmicro has developed an open source test suite for USB IP cores, which is available on our Github. In the presentation Rafal provided an overview of the topic and several open source technologies used there, including Cocotb and LiteX, proving that even complicated tests can be written with easy-to-understand Python syntax.
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“Reach to the (open) source of superpowers through integration, based on the example of Renode” by Dawid Wojciechowski, Software Engineering Intern at Antmicro -
Although there are a number of easily available open source tools, it's not easy to change your working habits and adopt a new toolchain overnight. Still, switching to non-proprietary solutions is a worthwhile idea that might open up new possibilities and bring a range of advantages.
Antmicro's Renode is an open development framework which accelerates IoT and embedded systems development by letting you simulate physical hardware systems. Renode could be used to great effect on its own, but integrating it with your development workflow will unleash its full potential, improving your whole process, from everyday coding and debugging, to testing your work locally, to creating complex Continuous Integration environments.
In his talk Dawid presented different approaches to integrating Renode with various tools, such as Wireshark and GDB. While some integration ideas were conceived by us, many others were suggested by our users, who showed amazing creativity in using the tool we made. Additionally, the presentation explained how we integrated Renode with some external tools and summarized what we learned in the process.
Please stay tuned for more details on the upcoming events.