Qi-Hardware - News

News Release: VJing Made So Simple Anyone Can Do It

Qi team — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 15:00:00 GMT

September 28, 2011 15:00 PM Central European Time
BERLIN, Germany

The Qi Hardware project is proud to announce the Milkymist One video synthesizer.

A total power consumption of only 5 watts and latency of only 60 milliseconds are the highlights of the new high-performance video synthesizer. Without additional computer, Milkymist One takes line-in audio to create real-time music visualizations. Ideal for musicians and DJs, restaurant and bar owners, people organizing parties or interested in visual art. The included camera feeds live video into the synthesis.

Milkymist One is the second product launched by Qi Hardware after the Ben NanoNote in March 2010. While the NanoNote was built around a MIPS-architecture SoC, Milkymist One takes copyleft freedoms one step further by being the first free computing architecture built around the GPL licensed 32-bit Milkymist SoC.

Visual artists benefit by being able to program their patches, including connectivity and control of DMX lights, lasers and MIDI instruments, all directly and in real-time from the Milkymist One synthesizer. Network connectivity allows the inclusion of live Twitter feeds. Free software programmers benefit by having the first fully programmable graphics accelerator at their disposal, opening the world of reusable and portable Verilog to free software developers.

Milkymist SoC is a new generation of collaboratively developed IC designs, founded in 2007 by Sebastien Bourdeauducq. It aims to be an ARM competitor with new sharism business model, allowing for greater development speed and better customization and optimization in embedded products.

Milkymist One is available from Sharism Ltd. now, and sells for 499 USD plus shipping from Taipei.

[1] Milkymist One shop: https://sharism.cc/milkymist/

[2] Media Gallery: https://sharism.cc/media/

EDITORS PLEASE NOTE: To request more information or find out about obtaining Milkymist One for review, please contact info@sharism.cc

--Qi team 15:00, 28 September 2011 (CET)

Copyleft Hardware News 2011-08-08

Qi team — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Language:

English ‪中文(台灣)‬

Qi News
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Copying is an act of love. Please copy & share.
Mimi and Eunice by Nina Paley

Buy

Join the new era of computing, slow fidelity on the freedom channel, and buy the world's best copyleft hardware

Product	Starting At	Shipping
Ben NanoNote	99 USD/EUR	Tuxbrain for Europe Sharism for US/Japan/others
atben-atusb Combo	59 EUR	Tuxbrain
Elphel 353	880 USD	Elphel
Elphel Eyesis	24,000 USD	Elphel

Projects

Homebrew CMOS and MEMS foundry

Andrew Zonenberg sighted The Nyan Cat on silicon!
This Nyanotechnology comes as part of Andrew's homebrew MEMS project by lithographic projection, the world's smallest nyan cat. His next goal is a comb drive. Lab Notes Pictures

The Nyan Cat head at 100x zoom. The entire cat is around 600 microns long and 360 microns high.

The Nyan Cat head at 400x zoom. Pixels are 20 microns square.

The Nyan Cat in the Toped IC layout editor.

Milkymist

Xiangfu Liu made recordings of four Milkymist One patches.

Starfield [57 s, 6.5 MB, download]	The Piper [1:10 min, 12.42 MB, download]
Slow Shift Matrix [1:8 min, 15.28 MB, download]	A Matter of Taste [1:10 min, 22.53 MB, download]

Lars-Peter Clausen and Michael Walle improved Linux 3.0 on Milkymist One. [1]
Lars-Peter Clausen ported an OpenWrt userland to Milkymist One, with static linking and uClibc. [2]
Xiangfu Liu setup daily builds of OpenWrt for Milkymist One. [3]
Lattice Semiconductor released version 3.8 of the Mico32 core, which among small fixes comes with a major cleanup of the licensing header at the top of every source file.
Earlier licensing headers were hard to understand and got some people to doubt the openess of the core. The new headers make the Mico32 core indisputably open source and GPL compatible. Lattice Download Comparison of old and new licensing header
Christopher Adams designed a new Milkymist logo and selected the free Orbitron font for logo and branding.
roh from Raumfahrtagentur engraved a mirror version of the new logo on the inside of the top acrylic for the upcoming RC3 run.

svg pdf

Milkymist One logo on acrylic.

Yi Zhang finished the Milkymist One box design and sent it off to the box makers.

PDF file sent to the printshop, prepared from a Scribus original.

Printed and die-cut box.

Adam Wang continued with Milkymist One RC3 production testing.
All production testing software is free software, results are tracked online.

Thirteen wires in and out of Milkymist One during production testing.

Wolfson Microelectronics' WM9707 audio codec helped reduce audio noise on the Milkymist One RC3 video synthesizer by 90%, from about 500 mV to about 50 mV.
Earlier runs used a National Semiconductor LM4550B codec. [4]
Cristian Paul ported the Namuru GPS correlator to the Milkymist SoC (thanks to Fabrizio Tapper and Peter Mumford for their support).
This core will allow speedup of the correlation process for getting a fix and tracking GPS satellites. Work continues on the OpenSourceGPS receiver which will provide the high level software interface to process the navigation data tracked by Namuru. Namuru port to Milkymist, Namuru datasheet, OpenSourceGPS code repository, OpenSourceGPS documentation
David Kühling helped port the SoftGNSS matlab code to GNU Octave.
This will allow offline analysis of raw data for a variety of GPS front-ends. SoftGNSS repo
Jon Phillips gave a talk about Milkymist One at FISL 12 in Porto Alegre, Brazil (slides of talk below). [5] [6]

Jon Phillips at FISL 12 (July 2, 2011, Porto Alegre, Brazil).
[46:17 min, 78 MB, download]

atben/atusb

Werner finished designing the ben-wpan boards, a set of IEEE 802.15.4 wireless dongles. [7]

Range of ben-wpan boards measured at Werner's apartment in Buenos Aires (dimensions in cm).

Werner wrote documentation and tools for the production and testing process of ben-wpan 802.15.4 boards.
A total of five pages, overview page and four detail pages. Announcement Overview

Production and testing process flowchart.

Tuxbrain produced 135 atben and 117 atusb boards and started selling on June 13.
One month later, David reported sales of 44 atben and 42 atusb boards.

David depanelizing PCBs

atben

atusb

Copyleft Hardware Explained

Werner Almesberger published a two part comparison of Free scripted CAD tools - Part 1, Part2.

Cadmium	CGAL	OpenCSG, showing artefacts
OpenSCAD	OpenSCAD, modeling artefact (internal structure)	OpenSCAD, modeling artefact (reversed face)

The names of component packages are often confusing and vary among manufacturers. This is Werner's first step (for small logic gates) towards a packageology.
Some data sheets don't contain all the information necessary to make Copyleft Hardware. Here is Werner's anatomy of a datasheet.

NanoNote

Jadon Dutra made two nice Ben NanoNote tutorial videos. [8]

Tutorial: Hello World program on Ben NanoNote.
[5:43 min, download 11 MB/52 MB]

Tutorial: How to boot Ben NanoNote into USB mode.
[2:23 min, download 5 MB/38 MB]

Werner published a test point map for the Ben NanoNote. [9]

Ben NanoNote test point map, SoC mappings here

sujan and zedstar took some NanoNotes on a trip to Nepal. We don't really know what happened, but got this nice picture back...

Ben NanoNote in Nepal

OpenLase

David from Tuxbrain found out about OpenLase, an open laser projector started by Hector Martin "marcan".
We are learning about lasers, galvanometers, dichroic mirrors and more now and are evaluating how to make good copyleft hardware out of this one day. Thanks David for bringing this up! OpenLase blog OpenLase sources

OpenLase laser projector.
[2:17 min, 20 MB, download]

OpenLase prototype used in making the video.

Detail of galvo (Galvanometer).

Presentations, Slides, Brochures

Jon,Werner and Sebastien talked about our projects, here's an opportunity to catch up and browse through slide decks, presentations, and a brochure.

Jon's slide deck on Milkymist One

(announcement, video)

Jon's slide deck on Copyleft Hardware

(announcement)

Werner's talk at FISL 12 in Porto Alegre about Copyleft Hardware

(source FISL 12 in Porto Alegre, Brazil)

Sebastien's talk at THSF 2011 in Toulouse about Milkymist One

(source THSF 2011 Toulouse Hacker Space Factory, May 28, 2011)

Sebastien's Milkymist One brochure

(source [10])

A happy continued summer everyone (winter for Werner). Cheers.

--Qi team 08:00, 8 August 2011 (CET)

Copyleft Hardware News 2011-06-01

Qi team — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 03:00:00 GMT

Copying is an act of love. Please copy & share.
Mimi and Eunice by Nina Paley

Milkymist

We decided to market Milkymist One as a video synthesizer, not interactive VJ station as planned before. Almost everybody on the project felt that video synthesizer would get more people to understand quicker what the product does, and lead them in the right direction with their second question, whereas interactive VJ station would send them in all sorts of different directions.
Yi Zhang took a series of Milkymist One product shots at the Mayray photo studio in Shanghai.

Sebastien and Xiangfu released several Milkymist One software updates. (Sebastien April 6 - v0.3, Xiangfu May 9 - snapshot, Sebastien May 23 - v0.4)

One of many new features and improvements in Milkymist One.

Milkymist One was demoed and used in many places around the world, by Kristian Paul at labSurlab in Medellín/Colombia, Jon Phillips at the 6th Libre Graphics Meeting in Montreal/Canada, guyzmo at a Lua workshop in Paris, Sebastien at PiXXXeL in Amsterdam, Vision-R festival in Paris and the Toulouse Hacker Space Factory.

Milkymist One at labSurlab in Medellín, Colombia, April 7, 2011

Xiangfu Liu added a screenshot feature to Milkymist One, here's a collection of screenshots.

Real-time video synthesis is an exciting feature of Milkymist One. There are still few recordings of performances, because nobody has a VGA grabber, and real-time encoding and streaming into formats such as Ogg Theora or WebM is possible but will require substantial work. Kristian Paul has recorded a small segment with a second video camera... (another one from Sebastien)

Video-in with Milkymist One. [0:27 min, 19.6 MB]

Xiangfu Liu demonstrated Open Sound Control ("OSC") with his Milkymist One. OSC is another promising way to control Milkymist One, with nice clients on popular smartphones and tablets.

Controlling Milkymist One from an Android phone over OSC (Note: video without sound). [0:57 min, 6.5 MB]

Andrew Zonenberg, a PhD student from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York is embarking on a series of semiconductor DIY experiments and projects. If you are interested in following his work, start with the 5-page long DIY fabrication of microstructures by projection photolitography. Andrew reports about progress in #milkymist on Freenode (webchat, backlog).
Next up on his agenda is the manufacture of a ring oscillator (pictured below) onto a 35 USD 4' ' wafer. If things go well after that maybe a replica of Intel's venerable 4004 CPU.
Andrew will document his entire process publicly, and release all tools under free licenses.

Ring Oscillator

Slashdot carried a post about our soon-to-be launched open CPU - Milkymist. [11]
Sebastien started writing a nice Wikipedia article about the Milkymist project. [12]
Sebastien managed to get a clarification from Google that they are not planning to release open and free sources for their WebM hardware codec. [13]
Two threads on the mailing list discussed plans about adding a MMU to the Milkymist SoC. [14], [15]
Hong Kong based Sharism Ltd, manufacturer of the Milkymist One, sold out its batch of Milkymist One RC2 units. A big THANKS! to all supportive buyers who believed in this product at such an early stage. RC3 will be available soon...
Adam Wang reported on the latest Milkymist One RC3 production status. [16]

NanoNote

Werner Almesberger implemented an external VGA display using the 8:10 memory card slot of his Ben NanoNote. Ben + UBB + a few components = VGA. homepage, mailing list posts: [17] [18], going high-res, DMA and 1024x768, dual-screen, 640x480 without FIFO jitter, productization, dithering

Ben NanoNote and external VGA display. [0:27 min, 4.8 MB]

Slashdot covered Werner's VGA hardware hack (and hackaday, and Dangerous Prototypes).
Werner Almesberger wrote dirtpan, a quick and dirty tool to demonstrate IPv4 over 802.15.4 ben-wpan boards. details

Ben and Ben talking. [3:30 min, 14.9 MB]
(background info: the video was cut using the command-line melt utility from the MTL framework, sound track P97 made with Korg Kaossilator, scripts)

Tuxbrain continued with ben-wpan production, PCBs have been made (see picture), component mounting date (SMT) is scheduled for next week.

Tuxbrain's ben-wpan PCBs.

kyak proposed a Russian keyboard layout for the NanoNote, Jane took it one step further and hacked her keyboard into a Colemak layout! [19]

Russian keyboard layout proposed by kyak.

Fabric paint as adhesive.

Jane's finished Colemak keyboard layout.

viric has been (for a while already) maintaining nanonixos, a Nix package manager based distribution for the Ben NanoNote. [20]
Mark Tuson reported running Debian Wheezy on his NanoNote. [21]
David Kuehling added hardware acceleration to the MPlayer video player, which can now play most files in Ogg Theora and WebM formats up to 320x240 and 30fps, and most audio except for surround-sound. Smaller video files are automatically played back full-screen by using the CPU's hardware-scaler. [22]

Big Buck Bunny from the Blender Foundation running on Ben NanoNote.

Hans Bezemer released 4tH v3.61.1 for the Ben Nanonote. Changelog

4tH on Ben, thanks to Hans Bezemer

Xiangfu Liu released a new OpenWrt 2011-05-28 image for Ben NanoNote. Announcement Changelog

Ben NanoNote OpenWrt 2011-05-28 image after bootup.

--Qi team 03:00, 1 June 2011 (CET)