Consumer Device With Open CPU Out of Beta Soon

lekernel writes "After years of passionate and engaging development, the video synthesizer from the Milkymist project is expected to go out of beta in August. Dubbed 'Milkymist One,' it features as central component a system-on-chip made exclusively of IP cores licensed under the open source principles, and is aimed at use by a general audience of video performance artists, clubs and musicians. It is one of the first consumer electronics products putting forward open source semiconductor IP, open PCB design and open source software at the same time. The full source code is available for download from Github, and a few hardware kits are available from specialized electronics distributors."

Whoop dee doo

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet it will be just a successful as OpenMoko which means it'll be a huge flop and almost no one will know about it.

Re:it's an entire system

[JackDW]

Indeed, hardly unusual. At the very beginning of opencores.org, which was certainly around a decade ago, there was a project of this sort. "ORsoc" ran Linux. The CPU was an Opencores design named OR1200, with a completely custom instruction set and a fork of GCC/glibc to support it. Everything was open source: the peripherals, the CPU, the video drivers, even the USB and Ethernet cores.

That SoC worked on FPGAs, but there were also ASICs, and I think it even turned up in some commercial products.

I suspect that this project is probably reusing quite a few components from Opencores. That Wishbone bus looks awfully familiar...

Re:Whoop dee doo

[wspraul]

-- disclosure: I manufacture Milkymist One -- If it's a dev kit, it's the most stunningly beautiful dev kit I know. Have you seen the pictures? http://en.qi-hardware.com/wiki/Milkymist_One_pictures [qi-hardware.com] Technical superiority is very hard to judge, our goal is to make it super easy to use (basically just turn on), and then allow for anybody to dive deeper and deeper into it, all the way to the free hardware acceleration in the fpga. Tutorials needs to be written, videos made, etc. I will take some time. But please accept for the 'dev kit' feedback: From day 1 of this project, we didn't want it to be a dev kit. All we care about is make very easy to use, beautiful, long lasting and fun products.

Re:Open source always takes a backseat.

[wspraul]

All wrong :-) It has no metal shielding because it is so well designed. We absolutely went to an EMI test lab to be able to classify it under CE and FCC regulation. Under FCC regulation, Milkymist One is a non-intential radiator and thus does not require an FCC ID. It is enough that the manufacturer verifies that it is in fact meeting the requirements of a non-intentional radiator. The entire test lab report (31 pages) is online

http://en.qi-hardware.com/wiki/File:Reichl_milkymist_one_tests_11000301.pdf