Open Research Institute Weekly Reports, 5 Jan 2022

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From YouTube: Non-technical Holiday FPGA Meetups

Description

Here's a few meeting videos from over the holidays. ORI was on reduced hours for the winter break. Lab maintenance, hard drive replacement, and NFS mounted file system work continued. Thank you to all our volunteers and supporters for a great 2021.

A

Look there's a fireside chat with two seats.

A

Okay, that's not exactly what I was expecting! Oh there it goes. Then we have a fire sign.

A

There's wait! That's hurricane we're at a fireside chat; yeah! Okay! Yes, just.

B

Warming, my hands.

A

Let's see what we got, I guess we, let's see, here's a a cafe. I'm gonna start it. Oh, that's um that is a blindingly bright cafe, I'm not sure I would ever want to eat there.

B

I see this, they sell coffee.

A

Yeah, that's good, but whoa.

A

All right fun on the project in a ski lift, okay, I'm not sure yeah. I guess this is like okay. Now you have about 47 seconds before we dump you off at the top to tell me how it's been going over the past week.

A

That's not easy because.

B

It's not a moving picture.

A

I oh that would be okay, that would be that'd, be kind of cool.

B

We could have the roller coaster overlay.

A

There we go all right now. This is where the real creativity comes to bear. This is a kitchen allegedly way too many mugs, mugs and cups, yeah, yeah, okay, they said kitchen, but this looks like this looks like more of a cafe than the cafe all right. What else do we got here? This is dark. Let's try this.

A

It's a happy halloween from zoom. um That's a little. It's sort of.

B

Like, like harry potter, yeah.

A

Yeah, that's that's what I was trying to remember the the there's like a was it that there's like a newspaper that has some.

B

Movies all pictures portraits and newspaper pictures and everything they all move in harry potter.

A

All right: well, you know, I guess we can have a little meeting like this and um that'd be kind of fun. It's now 10, so we can have our our stand up for the week.

A

I'm not sure I can take even myself seriously here, um but yes, the open research institute field, programmable gate array, a weekly stand-up meeting, is about what we did over the past week, what we have planned over the next week and if there is any roadblocks or needed resources for the team. We have a lot going on with how to boot over uh using an nfs or network file system, and we've been working through that and doing some.

A

Some good work there and I think, a separate video on how to like a walk-through might be a good idea. So because of the way that we do our work, it's a remote lab a lot of the assumptions from say, xilinx, vivado and pedal linux, uh and just in general, the the whole tool chain.

A

They assume that you're sitting there in front of the computer and that you can easily do things like make an sd card and put it in, but we don't do it that way, although we could, you know, handle a lot of sd cards for people remotely we'd like to make it as easy as possible and reduce the friction so that they can use the lab remotely, and there are lots of different ways to to do this. uh So we've we've found that that most of them work pretty well.

A

um But since this is uh somewhat unusual to have everybody, essentially everybody remote we're doing lots and lots of learning that, hopefully we'll be able to just roll out from the very beginning in remote lab south. So anyway, that's that's.

A

What I'd like to get done is to document all of what we're doing a little bit better, make it easier for people to use so far it turns out the one person that's most interested in the trivial ftp method is probably me and it it just seems satisfying, because I can copy all of the files needed from the pedal linux build to a particular directory on chunk and then go to start the system on the dev board and interrupt it at a particular place type in a command on the command line, and then everything works, but I'm getting the sense that this might be still a little bit too too much overhead or too many different steps for people.

A

So anything that can make it even easier. I think we should probably do anyway. That's it for me. What about you paul.

B

I have very little to report from the remote lab aside from messing around trying to get the nfs stuff to work.

B

The of the two drives that we declared to be dead from chunk. One of them seems to be fine and the other one. I've found a way to work around the problem, with the an extra connector to replace the broken ones. So we may have two spare drives that we can use when we need them for whatever purpose other than that. Nothing to report from the remote lab.

A

Cool, that's really good news. It's nice to have them back because they were expensive.

B

A

Yeah very good, all right, so what I'll do is, um let's close it down for the for the week and we'll work on a video to talk about all the things that we've been discussing in slack bye. Everybody see you next time.

A

Hello hi there.

B

I'm pretty sure it's morning here.

A

B

In the remote lab.

A

Plenty to talk about well, let's go ahead and start um welcome everyone to open research, institute's, fpga, stand-up meeting where we talk about what we've done for the past week, what we're going to do the next week and if we need any resources and if we have any roadblocks or blockers so paul. You have the floor.

B

Okay, well, there's not a lot going on here and get drives out for repair. It should come back replacement. Probably I'm setting up right now to trace ethernet packets to one of the dev boards, so we can have a better chance of debugging the network, boot strategy and that's all I know right now.

A

Okay, no, that sounds fantastic. I'd like to help work on that today, so I'll be I'll, be over soon.

B

I've recently learned an interesting distinction. What we're doing is not exactly nfs boot. That would mean downloading an image over nfs and running the image. What we're.

A

Actually doing is nfs mounting.

B

Our root file system and then booting from that we were able to boot the the other board. Now the board, with the radio on it, is booting from sd card now successfully, uh we've got hdmi cable hooked up to uh see it driving the monitor. So it's like a linux system itself. Now, for the moment, uh we didn't get very much further.

A

B

Though the having done that we're able to make progress, but only as long as somebody's here to swap sd cards when necessary, if we can replace this with a nfs mounted file system, boot, then we'll be in better shape for remote operation.

B