Wroclaw Open Source Meetup #8

Join us at Wroclaw Open Source Meetup #8 on Wednesday, January 29th!

We will welcome the upcoming new year with two presentations, a Q&A session and a socializing & networking afterparty till late. Be sure we have prepared an evening packed with open source high-tech goodness.

Agenda:

1. Testing open source USB IP cores with Python, Rafal Kapuscik, Software Engineer at Antmicro

USB is often a daunting topic for developers, and implementing support for it from scratch is a time-consuming task. When the expected result is more complicated than a USB-to-serial bridge, the solution would be to either use a hardware transceiver or, especially for older USB standards, use an open source core to implement one directly in the FPGA fabric. But which core to use? There are many different USB IP cores available, what was lacking is 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. Antmicro’s solution is an open source test suite for USB IP cores, available on our Github. This presentation will provide an overview of this 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.

2. Reach to the (open) source of superpowers through integration. Based on the example of Renode, Dawid Wojciechowski, C# Intern at Antmicro

Although there are many open source tools available within an arm's reach, it's not easy to change your working habits overnight. However, switching to non-proprietary solutions is a worthwhile idea that might open a new world of possibilities and bring an array of advantages.

Antmicro's Renode is an open development framework which accelerates IoT and embedded systems development by letting you simulate physical hardware systems. Although Renode could be used to great effect on its own, integrating it with your development workflow will immensely benefit the whole process, from everyday coding and debugging, to testing your work locally, to creating complex Continuous Integration environments. All this wouldn't be possible if Renode didn't leverage other great projects.

In this talk we will present different approaches to integrating Renode with other tools, like Wireshark and GDB. While some of these integrations were conceived by us, many others were suggested by our users, who surprised us with their creativity in using the tool we made. We will show you how we integrated Renode with some external tools and tell you what we learned in the process.

Registration:

Registration will be at the entry based on the meetup attendee list. You will be asked to provide your name, surname and affiliation. You have to be an adult to attend. Upon entering the venue, you agree that you might be photographed/filmed.

Afterparty:

After the presentations, stay with us for socializing and more discussions at the evening afterparty sponsored by Antmicro with a delicious cold and hot dinner menu, and a selection of regional craft beer and drinks!