fischerm

Re:Show HN: Manta – A tool for FPGA Debugging and Rapid Prototyping on Saturday March 09, 2024 @02:16PM (#39654023)

Thank you! Much appreciated, and let me know what could use more work!

Re:Show HN: Manta – A tool for FPGA Debugging and Rapid Prototyping on Friday March 08, 2024 @12:36PM (#39643488)

Good question! The design of LiteScope heavily inspired Manta, and Manta's Ethernet functionality comes from the LiteX Ethernet core.

That said, I spun Manta out into a separate project for a few reasons: - LiteX is written in nMigen, which has now spun off into Amaranth, and I wanted to use a language that's undergoing more active development. - I wanted to provide better support for non-SoC workflows. LiteScope is awesome when you're already using LiteX for your design, but it's a pretty steep barrier to entry if you're just trying to debug a class project real quick. - I wanted to provide a _lot_ of documentation! The original audience for the docs was undergraduate students that are new to the field and don't have a lot of time, so I wanted getting started to be as easy as possible.

I know the Amaranth project is working on it's own SoC tool, and I'll be curious to see how Manta evolves as the effort behind that ramps up.

Show HN: Manta – A tool for FPGA Debugging and Rapid Prototyping

Posted by fischerm on Thursday March 07, 2024 @07:49PM
from the show-hn dept.

https://fischermoseley.github.io/manta/

Hi HN! I'm Fischer, and I'm super stoked to share a project that I've been working on for a little over a year: Manta, an open-source, cross-platform, vendor-independent tool for debugging and rapid prototyping with FPGAs.This was originally my Master's Thesis at MIT, where I developed it for our course on FPGA design. We needed an alternative to vendor debugging tools, which only supported x86...

( Read More... | 5 comments | 2 points | on HN )

Re:The Art and Science of PCB Design on Saturday December 30, 2023 @11:57AM (#38816682)

They will be once the class starts and the lectures happen! In the meantime feel free to check out the resources from last year:

https://pcb.mit.edu/archive/IAP2023/

And the lectures are all on YouTube :)

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJpsOGUzkGzKMEPmRKWAJcLpK...

Re:The Art and Science of PCB Design on Saturday December 30, 2023 @11:52AM (#38816648)

Howdy everyone - Fischer here, I started this course last year along with my good friend Adi. Glad to see that this ended up on HN, and glad that people are excited about it and seem to find the content useful. The goal of putting this together was to help people have fun and feel empowered to build cool stuff, and from the comments here it looks like it's helping that. Yay :)

A quick note though: We're updating the site right now to get it ready for it's second running in IAP 2024, which is in about a week or two. So most of the content for this year is being built out, but everything from last year is available under the archive page:

https://pcb.mit.edu/archive/IAP2023/

Happy hacking!