486: A Nice Rainbow Dream

Antoine van Gelder spoke to us about making digital musical instruments, USB, and FPGAs. 

Antoine works for Great Scott Gadgets, specifically on the Cynthion USB protocol analysis tool that can be used in conjunction with Python and GSG’s FaceDancer to act as a new USB device. 

While bonding over MurderBot Diaries was a given, Antoine also mentioned NAND2Tetris which Elecia countered with The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles, the book that covers the NAND2Tetris material.

Transcript

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337: Not Completely Explode

Kate Temkin (@ktemkin) explained USB: how to get started, general orientation, useful tools, and when you’d use it in embedded systems.

Kate’s website is ktemkin.com. She works at Great Scott Gadgets.

References for USB: 

• USB in a Nutshell 

• USB Complete by Jan Axelson

• USB Embedded Hosts: The Developer’s Guide by Jan Axelson

• USB Specification, Chapter 9: USB Device Framework

USB Stacks we talked about:

• TinyUSB from Adafruit

• Lufa

• Cortex libopencm3

• For the host side: libusb

Open Source VIDs are available from Openmoko and Pid.codes

Kate recently gave a talk about making USB accessible. Part of the talk was about Luna, an FPGA based USB multitool.

Some open source FPGA tools:

• Symbiflow.github.io

• Yosys: http://www.clifford.at/yosys/