We had the opportunity to add a new feature to our lineup: the FLOSS Weekly podcast. It’s a very long running series that covers the goings on in the free, libre, and open-source software world. It’s been co-hosted by our own [Jonathan Bennett] for quite a while now, and when This Week in Tech announced that they wanted to cancel it, [Jonathan] asked if he could keep it running over here at Hackaday.
However, La-Tecnologia is hardware. Why would we host an open-source podcast?It’s no secret that many of us are general open source software enthusiasts here at La-Tecnologia, but we do a quick inventory of the open projects we use to create and hack our hardware. Open source compilers, libraries, and update teams to manage the firmware we write in open source text editors. Hell, some of the time we even program microcontrollers into the open-source MicroPython software. We design PCBs in the open-source KiCAD software, we do CAD/CAM in FreeCAD, and we’re not even familiar with the open-source software and firmware that underpins the entire ecology of 3D printing. Reverse engineering? Free software, from Wireshark to Ghidra.
All of this is to say, that even while we’re making or breaking hardware, we’re using open-source software to do it. So, if you’re interested in peeking behind the curtain, give the FLOSS Weekly a listen.
The FLOSS logo (?) made me think it was the silhouette of a dolphin (A. K. A Flipper). But I guess it’s meant to be a silhouette of Tux.
It’s a placeholder! More suitable illustrations to come. =)
Tom’s wife thought of him as a teddy bear.
I’ll add that FLOSS Weekly depends on listeners to help us find guests. So if you want us to interview the folks behind KiCad, tell us! Or even better, you can reach out to the KiCad team, and ask them to contact us about being on the show.
But it occurred to me that other people liked to pay for things?
Bring back Randal Schwartz!
Plan to make a guest appearance soon! =)
That’s awesome!
“I see that your Schwartz is bigger than mine!”
It’s deeper than that: designing hardware has the same level of flow control management and hierarchy as designing software. Software has instructions, libraries, APIs, and operating systems, while hardware has discreet components, integrated circuits, data sheets, and the laws of physics.
The only major difference is that data sheets are stable, with updates only containing more precise characterizations or rare cases of design errata. Meanwhile, libraries are full of errors, APIs are poorly documented and change regularly, and operating systems like to break everything.
The hardware developer only has to deal with the randomness of quantum physics, wile the software developer has to deal with an entire field that is bad at what they do. (See also: https://xkcd.com/2030/)
You make it look a lot worse than it is, dude.
Well, it’s not obvious at first glance in the software world, so welcome to the La-Tecnologia network that presents new angles on the problem.
FPGA software is the first thing I do. Some Lattice chips can now be developed with an open-source toolchain, but the “big guys” (Xilinx, Altera) still use compromised software.
If you think about it, even integrated circuits have evolved as software (in hardware description languages like Verilog and VHDL), where functional descriptions of logical habits are processed by automatic design and synthesis equipment (even open-source usable equipment is starting to arrive) to produce the chip designs; It’s software via and via.
You say that, however, the concept of modeling hardware design in software existed before hardware was smart enough to run those compute intensive models, so I would say that the hardware is the restrictive thing and it is hardware! in every sense! 🙂
Actually, of course, it’s both.
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