[Discuss] Some news from CERN

Javier Serrano Javier.Serrano at cern.ch
Tue Jul 9 12:45:43 UTC 2013


Dear all,

Here are some news from the Open Source Hardware efforts at CERN:


CERN Open Hardware Licence
--------------------------

We are quite close to the publication of version 1.2 of the licence.
There is a draft [1] open for comments, and discussions in the CERN OHL
mailing list [2] are steadily converging. Our aim is to publish it
towards the end of this month. The current draft includes ideas from a
recent article [3] which was posted here, and the author himself has
participated in the discussions. Feel free to join the mailing list if
you would like to participate as well.


ICALEPCS Pre-Conference Open Hardware Workshop
----------------------------------------------

This is a workshop under the umbrella of ICALEPCS, which is a biennial
conference on controls and data acquisition for big Physics facilities,
like particle accelerators, telescopes, etc. We did one in 2011 and it
was very successful, so we're doing another one in San Francisco in
October this year. It's very informal. Details can be found in the
workshop page [4]. Registration [5] is now open, and everyone is very
welcome. One of the big themes this year will be FOSS tools for
developing OSHW. Which takes me to...


Kicad
-----

Our contribution to Kicad [6] is now moving forward full-steam, even if
our steam is limited. We just submitted a new View component [7] for
review. The aim is to enable Kicad to display complex PCBs without
significant performance problems. Our test PCB is 12 layers. If this is
approved, we will move on to a very important work package: the Tool
Framework [8]. The idea is to make Kicad modular enough so that people
who want to add functionality to it don't have to touch its guts.

We liaised with CERN's Knowledge Transfer group to start raising funds
for Kicad development, through the "CERN and Society" initiative [9].
Our first donation came from Arduino [10], which is of course a great
honour, and we already put the money to produce code, mostly on
improving the footprint library table support in the layout editor. I
now intend to address potential donors in the education sector. If you
are involved with education and think Kicad could play an important role
there, please contact me off-list. In fact, please contact me if you
have any ideas for fund raising! :)

If the fund raising for Kicad proves effective and to the extent my time
allows, I would like to start a similar effort to fund development for
the Icarus Verilog simulator [11]. We have contributed to adding some
VHDL and SystemVerilog support (to the existing Verilog support) in the
past, with the aim of having a good FOSS tool for mixed-language
simulation, but there is still quite some work to be done.

Cheers,

Javier

[1] http://www.ohwr.org/documents/264
[2] http://lists.ohwr.org/sympa/info/cernohl
[3]
http://jipel.law.nyu.edu/2013/04/three-dimensional-printing-and-open-source-hardware/
[4] http://www.ohwr.org/projects/ohr-meta/wiki/OHW2013
[5] http://www.cvent.com/d/6cq5hx
[6] http://www.ohwr.org/projects/cern-kicad/wiki
[7]
http://www.ohwr.org/projects/cern-kicad/wiki/WorkPackages#3-View-component
[8]
http://www.ohwr.org/projects/cern-kicad/wiki/WorkPackages#5-Tool-framework
[9] http://cernandsociety.web.cern.ch/technology/kicad-development
[10] http://blog.arduino.cc/2013/06/10/arduino-donations-and-values/
[11] http://iverilog.icarus.com/


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